Steam Deck – Keep an eye on your email address because if you missed out on the first round of orders, now might be your chance to get your hands on Gabe Newell’s portable PC.
Warning, if Valve has indicated for the second quarter of this year (April-June) that they will make the Steam Deck available to us after we pre-order, be on the lookout as we have 72 hours to pay for our Valve PC! Valve posted about the second batch of deliveries on Twitter. They may not send out just one packet of email notifications per week, as they may send out up to two notification circles in a week, depending on their stock.
Of course, we should point out here that Valve sends out Steam Decks on a first-come, first-served basis, so the sooner you confirm your pre-order and pay, the better chance you have of getting your hands on the machine, which is available in three versions (storage varies, the base edition has eMMC, the other two have a larger NVMe SSD). Q3 covers the July-September quarter, and “after Q3” starts in October.
But it is not easy to add additional launchers to the Steam Deck. There’s a lot of fiddling to do on desktop mode, so launching the Epic Games Launcher, for example, takes a bit of patience and knowledge. To simplify things considerably, Computer Base has presented Lutris, an open-source program where you can quickly launch all the major launchers from a single interface.
Lutris can run support layers (Wine) and runtime environments thanks to its proprietary scripts. It allows you to run the Epic Games Store, Humble Bundle, GOG Galaxy, Steam and even the Dolphin emulator. It works with both Windows and Linux Steam. If the client is installed in the background, Origin, Ubisoft Connect, and even the soon-to-be-defunct Bethesda Launcher (it goes offline in May) can be launched. BattlEye and Easy Anti-Cheat also work.
So Lutris could yet be a beneficial solution for the more comfortable gamer to access as many of their games as possible without replacing SteamOS with Windows 10 (11?).
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