It seems a bit odd that they don't have a proper Steam application to make installing this easier. Any idea why they don't?

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I guess this is completely worthless for anyone (like the readers of this site) who could infer these things from the Steam Deck rating, but it will have some value to people who are less close to the details.

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There would also need to be work on be work on out of the box settings (resolution, FSR etc) that work with a particular hardware profile. I think that is needed today on the Steam Deck for docked use (I agree with e.g. this suggestion [External Link], but it would be even more necessary for a console -- 1280x800 would not be a very sensible TV assumption.

I also agree that the Verified status would have to be tightened. There are some things that I'm amazed aren't requirements. Two things that jump to mind are e.g.
- Sonic Mania is Steam Deck Verified, but as far as I can tell you cannot use a controller for player 2.
- There are a number of Verified games that do not isolate profiles within a Steam profile or support Cloud Saves properly. That means that if you use multiple profiles on a deck (which are not separate Linux users), you share the same game profile.

Needless to say fixing those sorts of things would make the existing Steam Deck in docked mode far more compelling.

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I think the strategy they took made sense on Steam Deck release and nothing will fix this problem better than millions of users that the publishers care about.

That said, I would find it very useful if the Steam Deck had stricter requirements on what is their top tier of Steam Deck support. Some things really need to be included in Verified (e.g. Cloud Saves support or at least per-Steam ID save directories [External Link]. I think a developer self-reported "We test updates on the Steam Deck before rolling them out" could be a good addition.

I also think that they should either roll in proper docking support into the verification or have a separate "Great on Dock" badge. I would love for games to have the optimal settings for a docked experience on most common TV resolutions with the right mix of Gamescope resolution, game resolution and things like FSR out of the box. A lot of my games can handle much higher resolutions and look far better on my 4K TV when I change things, but ideally someone (the developer in a perfect world) would be figuring that out once and all of us could just plug and play. Controllers also seem a bit hit and miss. Sonic Mania is Deck Verified and has "Full Controller Support", but as far as I can tell only supports a controller for player 1 and the second player has to use a keyboard.

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Quoting: KimyrielleI am thinking of a really compelling reason to containerize Steam and can't come up with one...

In addition to the points above, I really like the idea of being able to have a different Mesa stack than my regular workloads. I run Ubuntu 22.04 and value the stability for most things, but would like my games to have the benefit of all the recent work on the Mesa stack (and I mind less if they crash as a result). That is the default with the Steam snap, as I understand it:

https://snapcraft.io/blog/what-the-steam-snap-is-evolving [External Link]

Since the Steam snap is isolated from the rest of the host OS, we now include the Oibaf PPA by default. This means your games will be able to take advantage of bleeding edge Mesa libraries without impacting the stability of your system or the overhead of adding the PPA and re-enabling after upgrading.

That is less of an issue for me now that I have a Steam Deck, though.

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