Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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I have an 8 and a 7 year old who both have their own steam accounts as child accounts within my steam family. Both of them have access to a profile on the steam deck(though I have 2 decks so they can each use one at the same time) and they for the most part just work.
The steam user profile changes but the account the steam deck runs on doesn't. So some things stick around. Controller pairings and the like just work. Steam profile specific configs need to be done multiple times for each user (steam input custom mapping, etc) but I try and mostly stick to deck verified games for my kids because they really do just work.
I had a dock for a while and it also just kinda worked. But I didn't have to do much tweaking. The dock broke after a while though(jsaux not valve) and I never bothered to replace it since I ended up just installing moonlight in my tv and sunshine on my gaming PC(also Linux).
I don't have any experience with heroic launcher, but I did set up prism and Minecraft on their profiles and it just worked with the right deck compatible mod bundle.
The biggest issue I have found is sea of thieves will default to whichever the last signed in account is on any profile, so I just signed into it on my daughter's account and don't play it on the deck myself.
Docking it made it a bit more complicated for us as well, mostly because the kids don't know much about the tv inputs and honestly getting them set up would just take me a few seconds to turn it in, grab the charged controllers and get them to the home menu so I never really bothered to teach them it. But that's a non issue unless I buy another dock at some point in the future. They both prefer to be in mobile mode on the couch anyways.
Well for now all the kids games were bought on Steam so it’s easy to just use the Steam family.
I guess I’ll stick to Steam games for them and try to get verified ones so that there is almost nothing to set up.
On GOG I only have adult games or old kid games that my kids would probably find too old because it ain’t Fortnite anyway, but I wish it was easy to share things in a family through GOG.
And I know the games are DRM free so I can just copy them, but I wouldn’t want to have multiple installs on my Deck which already doesn’t have enough storage..
One install is fine! you just need to add it as a non steam game for each different steam account! (assume save progression doesnt matter as much)
GOG games are DRM free, pretty easy to share with family. Saves might be tricker on a single deck, but the game itself may have multiple save slots.