STEAM GROUP
Steam Labs SteamLabs
STEAM GROUP
Steam Labs SteamLabs
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Founded
29 May, 2019
Steamdeck UI experience is awful: UI lockups, crashes, input lock, etc
I've been using both the original deck and oled combined for a bit more than a year now and facing the same issues as when the first shipped. The UI is glorified broken web tech where even while trying to write in this form I'm faced with a flashing input box for every character that just hurts my eyes.

- The discovery queue is broken yet again where only touch works but since UI being broken so often one just moves on and uses the phone.
- Backing out after viewing a game breaks the UI navigation so only touch works.
- There seems to be infinite history stored with certain navigation paths as pressing back will cycle between a game's page, deck landing page, controller configuration, and so on (please turn this broken thing off and just use a fixed navigation tree, there's no need for a navigation stack for regular UI as there is a fixed path one can take to every menu with the root placed at the landing page for everything other than the store...).
- Switching between FFXIV and another "game" (chromium) enough times will often slow the UI or cause it to crash.
- steam+X to spawn a keyboard while playing FFXIV can sometimes take 30-120 seconds or lock all input for a few minutes.
- While writing this post the damn UI jumps all over the place on backspace and the on-screen keyboard stopped working (oh and "use touch" because of course that breaks too) so now I'm using an external keyboard and regretting writing this on the deck.
- Switching between steamdeck UI and a game too many times will cause it to lockup and take anywhere from 10 seconds to a few minutes to respond to any input at all (even suspend is down during this time).
- Sometimes the UI breaks such that the time, connectivity, and battery doesn't show on the right menu which is often where it also lags.
- Other times the UI will break and draw black where it's supposed to show content under it such that "10% battery left" leaves you blind during gameplay with a black screen for the duration of the notification.
- The deck will crash at random and restart after extended use for a single session.

The deck is overall a miserable experience if one needs to type anything using the on-screen keyboard frequently (common for MMOs) or switch to a browser to check universalis a few times per session. I'm pretty much only putting up with the thing as the deck is a linux handheld.