I don’t sound old, I am old. Remember Wang?

Never played games on a pc or phone etc. The Deck opened up a whole new world of games and getting away from console brain was liberating.

Glad you’re liking it!

There’s a lot of needless worry over Proton. I simply do not understand why.

It’s not like rolling back BIOS or installing outdated drivers because the new ones break everything, etc.

Check out these:

Users often (not always) post their working Proton version for any particular game on ProtonDB. There’s even a Decky plugin for ProtonDB so you don’t have to leave gaming mode.

Install ProtonUp-QT from the Discover Store and it’ll scan the games you have on your Deck and recommend which version to use, if that game is in ProtonUP-QT’s database.

And for any itch dot io game, just always use GE. It’s a miracle. You’ll find many useful tools along the way and yes, Linux is the only way to go, IMO.

It’s replaced my consoles entirely.

I got a Steam Deck to get away from the AAA/PSN/Xbox OnePass or whatever it’s called mindset, and I’ve never had any interest in PC gaming.

Consoles evolved the way cable TV did. Early cable didn’t have commercials; you already paid for content delivery by paying for cable. Now cable TV has wall-to-wall commercials just like air TV and you pay for cable also. The main reason I haven’t watched any TV at all in … decades.

That’s how consoles work these days. Sony, MS & Nintendo want subscription fees, shark cards, all that bullshit, on top of buying the games and the consoles themselves.

I tried to give my PS4 to a relative and even they didn’t want it. ‘Last gen’ blah blah blah.

My Xbox is a dedicated DVD player ever since my DVD blu-ray player kicked the bucket.

You most likely won’t need to use it anyways, at least I don’t, except:

I play a lot of itch games which are almost all Unity K&M games, and I have to use GE on all those games. I’m grateful for it.

I haven’t used anything but a Deck in over a year - no pads, never play on computer, etc. The Deck replaced my PS4 & Xbox One.

The Deck is extremely comfortable.

At the moment, I actually prefer the heavier OG over the OLED I just got. Last night I was working with both my OG and also OLED and I could feel the difference. But I’ll get used to it.

Forgot to add, you don’t have to install your games, you can just launch them through itch as regular, which is a good reason why to put the itch launcher as a non-Steam game.

I just did this for itch dot io. Not the others.

I used a program called Lutris, which is available in the Discovery Store. Download Lutris from the discovery store and it installs to Games on your application launcher, the Steam icon on the taskbar all the way to the left.

From there, open up Lutris. You might see some update screens, just let it run.

Now you have to add itch to Lutris. So:

In Lutris, press the + button in the upper left corner, select the first option and type in ‘itch.io’ (minus the '), select it and it installs the itch launcher into Lutris. Make sure to tick the box that says ‘make desktop shortcut’, you’ll need that.

You’ll get a bunch of installation screens, when that’s done you’ll get a ‘launch’ option but just ignore it and close out of everything.

This process will put a desktop icon for itch. It looks like a blank sheet of paper.

Right click on that, and select ‘add to Steam’. Now it’s a non-Steam game you can access from Game Mode just like any other game. You can delete that shortcut now if you want.

And that’s it.

That might sound laborious and all but it’s really simple. The hardest part is waiting for all the download/installation/configuration stuff to run.

In Game Mode just launch itch like any other game and you get the itch launcher and log into your account. From here you can install and update your itch games.

One thing to bear in mind is that itch installs your games but uses Wine, so they install on the c:\\ drive, which is hidden. So make sure you note where itch is installing your games so when you go to desktop to add your itch games as non-Steam games, you’ll need to tick ‘show hidden files’ and then just navigate to the subfolder where the .exe file is. All your itch games will be in that subfolder. This works just like Windows, if that helps.

Since the subfolder with all your games is like 6 subfolders deep, you can right click on that subfolder and make a desktop shortcut for it, so when you want to add a game that shortcut will take you directly to the itch games subfolder. All your itch games install to that one subfolder so the shortcut is super handy.

I’ve installed about 60 itch games this way. They all run perfectly but make sure you use Glorious Eggroll as compatibility.

Sorry this was so long.