Recently had a question about a game running on the deck, and actually got me thinking since steamos settings were briefly discussed: what are the settings to change for a steam deck, or tools to add? I do not mean more fps or more performance per say only, but more battery life or just better tools for certain aspects of the deck.
Decky loader with the protondb badge plugin was the biggest qol upgrade for me. Also heroic launcher
I would say try out Junk Store for the alternative game stores so long as you’re using Decky Loader. I greatly prefer it over Heroic
Junk Store dev gives me bad vibes and is charging money for GoG access, and after a recent update is forcing everyone to purchase a second license from his Patreon to access GoG again. I say fuck that noise, that’s sketchy af
We want to clear up a few misunderstandings.
First, we are not charging money for access to your GOG games. That implies you have no other way to use them, which simply isn’t true—there are other tools available, and we encourage users to support those projects too, since they also require time, effort, and funding to maintain.
Junk Store was designed to be extensible. Our dev made it open to community contributions from day one—especially for those with Python skills—so that development could be shared. If someone in the community built and released a GOG extension as open source, we would absolutely welcome that. The reason we charge for our GOG extension is simple: our tiny team is doing all the work, and community demand keeps growing. Our developer has already put over 1,000 hours into the open source core and another 400 into the GOG extension—solo. The new closed-source version has required nearly 4,500 hours, including building our own Decky alternative to operate independently. This scale of effort simply isn’t sustainable without support.
Also, no final pricing has been announced—so any claims about being “forced” to pay are speculative and incorrect. The existing open source plugin and GOG extension will remain available. No one is being locked out. Yes, the upcoming version offers added features, but users aren’t being forced to upgrade. We’re committed to transparency, choice, and sustainability.
There’s a widespread misconception in open source that developers’ time is free. That idea is both unfair and damaging. Quality software takes work, and that work deserves respect.
We’re committed to choice, transparency, and fairness. No tricks, no lock-ins—just a small team trying to build something awesome, and asking to be supported for the work we do. That’s not sketchy. That’s just honest.
Great rebuke. Once you guys release the paid version, you may have swayed me any anyone reading to consider buying in. Hopefully you guys don’t force a recurring payment like how you have set up through your Patreon
We get that not everyone will agree with every decision, but we’re aiming for a balance between sustainability and fairness. The goal isn’t to nickel-and-dime—it’s to make sure we can keep building without burning out.
Just to clarify: the GOG extension is a one-off purchase—$6 through Ko-fi or Patreon shop (and has been for a while). If you want it for $5, you can sub and cancel right away (which you have always been able to do), though that adds a bit of manual work for us when updates roll out. Recurring support is totally optional and only for those who choose to subscribe, like they do with plenty of other open source projects.
We’re Kiwis, so this might sound a bit blunt—but honestly, the software should speak for itself. If it doesn’t work for someone, they shouldn’t use it. We’re not into pushing it or spinning hype. We’ve never peddled it or tried to sell people on it. The folks who do use it? They stick around because it does what it’s supposed to, and fills a real need. That’s it.
Thanks! Will check it out
Decky loader is actually very interesting, thanks for sharing!
I like the vanilla experience with no fear of breaking with an update.
Although as I’m still nerdy I do a lot of per-game tweaking for steam input and a few launch scripts for non-steam games. The desktop utility from steamgriddb is also awesome if you manually setup non-steam games.
No plugins, just adjust max tdp and fps limit. I haven’t felt the need for any plugins save for protontricks for old and obscure games.
This is also a good one. Do you notice any battery life changes after the tdp changes that are substantial? I never looked into it too much, but I assume there are very subtle ways to get a bit more battery without too much sacrifices
TDP limits can sometimes give you increased battery life with no change in game quality. However if you ever notice the game freezing or stuttering, make sure to disable TDP limit and see if that fixes it.
Tdp and fps does a lot to save battery life. It saveshours on some games by not wasting resources running them faster than they need to be.
Heroic, Lutris or Bottles have to be installed to easier manage non-Steam games.
And BTRFS with compression and deduplication are great to save space.
Also curious how you did this. Seems like a big job to wipe and reinstall with btrs
Ext4 can be converted to BTRFS without data loss. The only downside is that you lose ext4’s capability to have case insensitive folders.
Sounds like a benefit to me. Having a folder named “Documents” and “documents” is quite annoying.
How did you do that? Did you re-format Steam Deck?
You can use this tool to convert the deck.
The only downside I know of is that if your SteamOS install becomes corrupted (though a bug or from you messing something up), the Steam OS recovery drives won’t be able to fix it without wiping all your internal data. In comparison, with the original ext4 there’s a recovery option to only repair steamOS and leave your data intact.
This isn’t as bad as it sounds, you can still manually backup any of your important data before wiping and restoring the drive (you can access the BTRFS system from the recovery drive, and copy anything important onto a microSD or other storage device), but it’s definitely less convenient.
There’s an easy tool to do that. The beauty of ext4 is that it can be converted to BTRFS without any data loss.
Can’t remember what the tool is called and by now I don’t use SteamOS any more. But a search engine of your choice should find it.
And BTRFS with compression and deduplication are great to save space.
I’m not sure I’d go as far as replacing the file system. There’s a plethora of tools to do deduplication on ext4 as well. Albeit manually (or via cronjob).
Also, btrfs seems to be slower for random reads than ext4. At least that was the case back in 2019.
I’ve heard that using BTRFS with compression on a microSD and other slow access storage can actually speed up load times, because the biggest bottleneck is the read/write speed.
If you’ve got a slow-ish SD card and a game that compresses very well, then this might be the case. But with a modern card from e.g. SanDisk or Samsung with U3 and A2 certifications, this probably won’t do that much.
Interesting one. I was aware of btrfs but never thought about for the deck. Heroic is on my toolbox already
