Frankly this is quite preposterous. It is incredibly valid to discuss any issues people might be having with their product in a subreddit devoted to exactly that device. I can’t imagine more valid discussion points or a better place to talk about it.

The fact that people asking about or reporting an issue troubles some people is a bit alarming. I sincerely hope that people don’t make a Steam Deck so much of their personal identity that they can’t tolerate any critical discussion of the product.

Mine went sideways on me two nights ago because I was installing Bioshock 1. I wound up having to hold down the power button for about ten seconds to force it to shut off. (Just because the screen is off doesn’t mean it’s not running.) After that, I was able to single press the power button for I think about three seconds and it came back on.

When you do get yours to come back on, I would set up a SteamOS recovery image and flash that thing back to factory and start over without a card in the slot. Once you get logged in, updated, and make sure it’s working OK, then put the card back in and see about getting that thing mounted and operational. It might not be a bad idea to format it too and start over.

512GB OLED complete at 10:13 AM PST. I restarted a couple of times. I removed it from my cart and added it back twice because I thought something was broken on my end. Once I realized the servers were on fire I just kept hammering on buttons and F5 until it went through.

OK. For OP, I think the learning from this event is that on the next Steam Deck release, we need a sticky with some general advice about how to buy something on overloaded servers. A lot of people here took error messages at face value, gave up, and wandered away angry and disappointed.

There’s a number of strategies to make it through to the end and I think we forgot to talk about that in time.

I managed the $549 model. Lots of F5, clicking continue, clicking purchase, clicking I agree… F5, Continue… Agree… Oh crap… Oh no…

It worked!

(I may have purchased 10. I’m not sure.)

The LCD can literally only cover 70% of the very basic sRGB color gamut. The saturation slider in SteamOS 3.5 does not “correct” this problem. The OLED screen is not better because the saturation slider is cranked up. It’s better because it covers 100% of sRGB, 97% of DCI-P3, is capable of 600 nits in SDR, and 1000 nits in HDR. It has per pixel dimming allowing it to have infinite contrast. OLED pixels transition between colors effectively instantaneously for the purposes of a gaming discussion.

These two things are simply incomparable regardless of the version of SteamOS running. The LCD appears pale to the eye without the Decky Loader plugin because it cannot generate the necessary colors. Cranking up the saturation makes the colors it can generate appear more vibrant but wildly inaccurate.