I'm thinking I'll start w/ something like this.  Print the dock to sit it in and buy something w/ USB and HDMI out that fits in it.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5364776

My wife's came in a few weeks ago.  Its a great system, extremely impressed with the execution.  With a dock this can easily take the place of a cheap gaming pc.

Been playing a bunch of No Man's Sky.

It's definitely a great loss leader for Steam OS.

Just got the email today that said it was available.

I was just getting caught up on this thread and was about to reply to your last comment saying you should be up anytime now lol. Congrats!

I've had a little time to tinker with it and have loaded about 120 ROMS onto it so far. This thing is pretty impressive. I definitely recommend getting EmuDeck installed on it if you're into retro games.



My plan tonight is to get some more ROMs installed and get the EPIC Game Launcher installed.

Nice looking setup

I was surprised to see the email today.  Everything I'd seen said they send them on Monday.   Now I'm looking at micro SD cards and docks...

When you get the micro SD make sure to get an A2 over an A1. They're a little more, but the read/write speeds are much better. I've heard people say their games were taking forever to install with A1 SD cards.

I went with a SanDisk 1TB A2 Micro SD and it has been great

I'd wait on a good dock.  USB 2.0 sucks for this stuff.

I ordered this  for now.  There's a 3d printable dock I'm going to print to use w/ it for now.  I'll see how it works.

I was able to get Epic Games Launcher downloaded on the Steam Deck last night. I was only able to test Rocket League so far and it ran flawlessly. The only issue I have had with it so far is I haven't been  able to figure out how to get the games to save to the SD card.

I got the shipping notification.  Hopefully mine makes it here without any issue.
Seems like there's a bunch of them getting reported stolen or lost by fedex.  The other issue that is common looks like the glue on the screens in the 512gb models not being fully cured on arrival.  I'm planning to use my wife's arts and crafts UV epoxy curing light on the screen just in case.

https://www.jsaux.com/products/steam-deck-docking-station?variant=42988808536284

Dock Im getting.  Usb 2 is fine for just a mouse and keyboard.

I haven't heard that about the screens yet. My 512 arrived and the screen was great.


That seems to be the best option right now. I've heard good things about it.

The issue is that the screen starts out looking great, but the glue under it isn't fully set.  After some heat cycles it causes a pattern of translucent dots to appear in the screen.  The running theory is this started popping up when valve ramped up their production.  And something about the etched glass screens for the 512gb models requires longer to cure than the other screens.



I haven't been keeping up with all the docks.  I know some of them are coming with only 100mbit internet ports.  I tried looking up the specs for that specific model and everything seems to just say it has an ethernet port, without mentioning a speed.  For their other models by the same manufacturer, they specifically call out gbit ethernet ports.

If they just have USB2 and its sharing a bus with the ethernet adapter, then its gonna be like an old raspberry pi 2.  The internet was like going back to dialup on those.

So it looks like JSAUX just rolled out a new dock with USB 3.0 and gigabit LAN port.

Upgraded Dock

Original Dock

Edit:
Just ordered the upgraded dock. Code "JSAUX2022" brought the price down to $42.50 and anything over $25 is free shipping. I'll update when i receive it.

Geez...

It looks like it's coming directly from China lol

I've had my deck a few days now.  The emudeck project works pretty well.  Its evolving pretty quickly so all the guides and videos go out of date as fast as they are posted.  But I did manage to get through a bunch of the emulators and the defaults that emudeck setup are pretty sane and cohesive.

No trouble playing all the old stuff like atari, nes, gamebox, snes, genesis, and even ps1.  When I get to gran turismo on PS2, i can't tell if its the emulator being slow or maybe i'm just starting at the beginning of the game where all you have is the slow ass PT cruiser cars.  The audio is a little garbled.  N64 smash bros works well.  It feels a little slow, but that may be me forgetting how the old one played.  I've been playing the wii and wii-u version for years.  Mario kart on the switch plays pretty smooth.  It did stutter the first few races while it was compiling shaders.  It runs a lot better meow.

I'm a long time linux user, with KDE being my daily driver operating system for the past like 12 years.  Coming to the steam deck, running arch with kde is familiar and I know my way around the os in desktop mode generally.  Even though they're running arch, they are running it in RO mode, which means you can't use pacman to install things.  You can switch it to RW mode, but your changes will get nuked next time you get a steam update.  You should instead use flatpak and appimage when downloading software to leave the OS in RO mode.  That means it may be a little harder to find a specific program you want.  

There is no default password.  You can set your password in the terminal.  After that, sudo works and you can run as root.  The device really is unlocked and yours to do with as you want.  Valve wasn't bullshitting on that one.
ssh is installed by default but not enabled.  You can use your root powers to enable it.  I did that and i've been using ssh to push and pull files from my computer.
The desktop is pretty much the default you get when you install any other distro with KDE.  On the decks screen size, that makes it barely usable without a keyboard and mouse.  Needing both of those, you may also need a USB-C dongle.

The built-in wifi chip is pretty good.  If you have decent wifi in your house, you can get pretty respectable speeds.  I was able to pull 440mbit speed test over wifi.  My plan with the ISP is 500mbit, so that may be my bottleneck.

I've had mine for a couple of days and haven't played a game on it yet...    I've been busy seeing what I can install on the desktop.   I think I got about 400Mb down at home and 350 up when I tested it.  I've got a 1Gb fiber feed.   Going to do some more testing and should have a gigabit NIC I can test on Monday.

I have 1gb fiber as well. Mine did surprisingly well over wifi. I'm pretty positive the Steam Deck is 802.11ac instead of 802.11ax.

I just ordered my second 512GB model.  Had a buddy from work who preordered with me a year ago.  His email rolled around and life happened and he wasn't in a great position to buy the thing.  I stepped up and took it from him.

Figured the wife may want it.  Or I can always flip it on ebay for a quick $500.    Maybe toss it up on the EE and trade it for some gun parts.  Who knows?!

The new JSAUX dock just arrived. I'll update with some info when I have a chance to play with it.

Still waiting on mine.  Shipping for over a week and a half and shows it's still in China lol...

I'd like one of those, but didn't want to wait.     I'll probably end up w/ it or something like it if they work and are available.

I'm guessing they will be on Amazon soon. The first version was, but this one is just too new to be on there yet.

@sbye

How long did it take to arrive once you got your shipping notification?

Mine hasn't updated since the 8th, still shows it's in the same spot in China that it arrived on the 16th lol.  I ordered right after you posted.

That fucker's stolen.

Kharn

I purchased mine on the 7th and received shipping info on 8/16.

Looks like you can get them on Amazon now. HERE

For a Labor Day surprise, I just got my 512gb Steam Deck purchase email.

I figured it was going to be December before mine was available... I guess they are slamming through the orders now. Either that or nobody is ordering the 512gb units.

I think its the former.  They have really ramped up production.  I got my 512gb.  Then my buddy's order email came sooner than expected, and my wife took his spot and he was gonna take hers which was Q4.  But a week later, they bumped her up to Q3 sand sent out the email.  I was thinking about buying that one and flipping it for extra scratch on ebay, but the way valve is really cranking these out, I think the supply is gonna catch up with demand and there won't be any profit left for the flippers.  Probably soon enough, there won't even be a queue.  You'll be able to just decide you want one and order it directly from valve.

JSAUX has already rolled out a new docking station with a built in M.2 slot HERE

That looks like a good option.

Got my Steam Deck yesterday but haven't had a lot of time to mess with it. My initial impressions are that the thing is bigger than I expected, and of a very high build quality.

For those doing emulation, how are you getting your roms and bios files onto the SD card from Windows?

I'm used to using stuff like WinSCP to access Linux file systems on Raspberry Pi systems, but it appears you cannot "see" the SD card on the Steam Deck that way. I tried using the Linux File Systems for Windows app to transfer files to the SD card in an adapter, but it didn't work for me (excessive errors, data not actually copying over, etc. etc.)

From what I can see initially EmuDeck seems like it will work fine, but it all hinges on me being able to actually get my roms onto the SD card intact.

I have installed the emulators, but haven't made the time to do anything w/ them which includes copying ROMs and other files.    I figured I would either shut down the steam deck, eject the card, and then put it in a card reader.  Might need a program that will read linux file systems if that's the case, but that's not a big deal.  Or look into SSH/WinSCP on the Steam Deck.  Might be able to install or enable it.

edited to add
Here's some info I just looked up on Steam Deck SCP.  
https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/ta8bv8/how_to_transfer_files_from_windows_to_steam_deck/

I am taking the ROM files and putting them on a USB stick. Then I plug that into the Steam Deck and copy/paste the files to the proper folders when in desktop mode. If you don't have a dock then you can buy one of THESE to connect the USB. It's much easier to do with a keyboard and mouse, but can be done on the handheld.

That is probably what I'll need to do, get one of those USB-C to USB 3.0 adapters and use one of my portable hard drives.

I have a synology server, I just made a folder for all of my roms.  Then I set up syncthing on both the synology and the deck, and pointed to the correct locations on both devices.  I have it set to share one way from the server > Deck.  I sync them, and move everything out of the sync folder on the server so the deck doesn't continually download them again.  I then move them to the correct folders in Emudeck on the Deck and go to town playing.  

I've synced back and fourth a few times to trade save files from deck to PC and then from PC back to the Deck and it works fine too.

ETA:

You don't need a server, you can install it on your windows PC as well.  I simply did it the server way because then everything is just there if I ever need it, I just move the folders to prevent excess downloads to the deck.

Initially i copied the files to the SD card on my computer and plugged it into the deck.

Once the emulation and all was setup, i haven't removed the sd card from the deck.  I setup a password and then enabled SSH on the deck.  You can use scp and sshfs and whatnot to copy smaller files.  For the bigger files, i just use a USB-C SSD.  The sandisk extreme one transfers like 2GB/sec.  That really comes in handy when you get to consoles from gamecube and later.  500MB games from back then.  And now even some switch games are 17GB.

The SD card gets mounted at '/run/media/mmcblk0p1' and is accessible by the user 'deck'.

I'm attempting to copy stuff now using WinSCP using this location. I guess the tutorials I found were out of date as nobody seemed to know that location was the SD card.

You guys are doing this the extreme hard way.

Just follow this video, use Syncthing, enjoy a quick and easy transfer without bothering with SD cards back and fourth.

Not quite.  Sync thing is for keeping different folders in sync across machines.  That is not the same as pushing some files you download from the internet to a specific folder on a remote machine.   It would be pants on head retarded to setup a new syncthing shared target folder for every possible location on the steam deck you wanted to push files.  The roms, saves, and bios all have specific folders they go in.

And we (at least I) am not moving the SD card back and forth.  I'm using the SD card as extra storage in the steam deck where speed isn't important.  It lives there 24/7.

Pants on retarded is thinking you're setting syncthing to push to multiple locations.

You set it to your roms folder, or any folder you want.  Then you sync the folders, PUSHING from  the location where you have the files, to the area you want the files.

Know how I know you didn't watch the video?

I've been using syncthing for longer than that video's been out.  I know how it works.

No, its not faster or easier than
scp nes_roms/mario.zip deck:.../roms

Use it if you want to.  Its good to have options.  But for this situation, syncthing is more work to setup and use.

I reserved my 512gb model on 7/4/22.
Steam is now saying Q3 (July-September) 2022 expected availability.

Tick-tock...

Kharn

It was available for me to order today.

And of course my credit card declined the transaction for suspicious behavior, requiring I verify the charge before it could go through. I guess it's been a long time since a $200+ Steam Sale binge.

All three models are showing a reservation made today as September to December 2022 availability.

Kharn

i picked one up off a reservation a friend didn't want to keep. just got it in the mail a couple of days ago. it's extremely impressive.

Placed my reservation for the 64 gig model on September 25th. Just got the purchase email today.

I placed mine a couple weeks ago and got my notice on the 29th. I was really hoping they would ship it fast. Flying out to see my folks and would love to have it on the flight. I'm sure it will arrive the day after I fly out, lol.

I suck incredibly badly with a controller.

I'm trying to play Kingdom Come Deliverance for the first time in years (the sword fighting with a mouse and keyboard was impossible at release) and jfc just navigating to pick up flowers is a bitch when you have to release the thumb stick to hit the A button to grab the damn marigolds.

No wonder console players get yeeted whenever they cross platform with PC players.

I really need to get a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard for regular navigation, and use the built in controls for fights.

Kharn