5 Things You Should Avoid Doing on Your Steam Deck

I’ve been covering the Steam Deck since it was announced in 2021. From putting together three detailed guides on microSD cards, to reviewing a variety of accessories, and even taking apart my Steam Deck to replace some internals. Over the years, I’ve collected five main points from my experience with Valve hardware to avoid.

The Steam Deck is a nifty machine, released in 2022; it’s not a console. Instead, Steam store owner Valve launched the handheld as a way to act as a sidekick or bring some of its audience into the PC fold proper. Since its launch, the company has sold around five million units and recently launched the Steam Machine, a similar concept in the form of a purpose-built PC.

After nearly five years of using the Steam Deck, one of the most impressive things is how simplistic it can be, or as ridiculously modified as you like. These are just a few of the things to completely avoid with your Steam Deck. One of them, before you even start, is don’t buy one for almost $1,000.

One of the worst projects I have ever been involved with was installing the DeckHD display. No matter how much these sign manufacturers advertise, it is never an “immediate” solution. You will have to completely disassemble your Steam Deck and absolutely come across a stripped screw. With an OLED panel now available to LCD owners, it’s just not worth it. Once put back together, nothing ever seemed perfect.

One of the angles that these panels will advertise on is to offer a better quality screen. By default, the Steam Deck is limited to 800p, or 1280×800, and for good reason. DeckSight and DeckHD can offer 1080p or 1200p respectively, but the system was never designed to go that far in every game. 800p works almost perfectly with the internal hardware, allowing games from the PS4/Xbox One generation and below to run at a constant 30-60fps and up to 90fps on OLED. Increasing this will, from experience, leave you with performance issues unless you count on scaling.

Keep things simple and leave almost all the internals alone. The only recommendations I would make for replacing items are the SSD if you’re still using the 256GB or 64GB models. I also upgraded my joysticks to the GuliKit Hall Effect ones, as I started to notice a bit of dragging. These mods do not require complete disassembly, but just require a few tender fingers and a screwdriver.

Speaking of opening your Steam Deck, don’t forget to remove your microSD card from it if you do so. As the back of the case rises, it directly cuts into the SD card slot, causing the microSD inside to protrude slightly. This will break in half when you lift the back and you will break your SD card.

Why is this one of the biggest warnings to give? This happens all the time, even today. Seriously, check out the Steam Deck Reddit forum and you’ll see a litany of devices that have severed a microSD card. Plus, this might be the worst possible time to run out of an SD card.

With the current pricing crisis, driven by AI tariffs and data centers hogging RAM and storage, microSD card prices have skyrocketed. Hardware has gone from being a fairly simple, if slightly overpriced, solution to upgrading Steam Deck storage to stealing by daylight. These aren’t even good microSD cards, the much faster Express models used on the Switch 2 aren’t supported. Paying almost $100 for a 512GB microSD card is absurd, since that was the price of a 1TB card in 2024.

One thing Steam Deck users quickly get used to is ignoring Valve’s compatibility rating system. Originally intended to indicate whether the game would run properly on the Deck, and supported by Valve’s Windows to Linux translation layer, Proton, this was never quite right. Even at launch, games listed as unsupported were only declared non-functional because they had previously coughed up a launcher that was not compatible with the controller. This is easily circumvented by using the touchpads as a mouse or the touchscreen itself.

Worse yet, some games listed as Verified barely work. “Death Stranding 2,” for example, received the green badge for being fully functional. At launch it was too intense on the hardware and needed a mod to clean it up. It wasn’t until April that a patch was released with some improvements to the overall performance of the Deck. This is one of the best stories, with several games listed as verified, but performing poorly across the board.

When it comes to getting the right information, it’s always best to consult ProtonDB. It’s a community-run site that connects directly to Steam and logs everything from performance reports to Linux or Proton tweaks. For example, “Avowed”, launching in 2025, is technically verified, but as recently as five months ago, a report from ProtonDB claimed that the game was simply not playable on the Deck’s hardware.

It’s always nice to have a brand new, fully functional game on the Steam Deck. With so many games released on Steam and the industry about to head into a deluge of new releases, it’s always worth noting that long-time Steam users shouldn’t ignore their delays.

Steam Deck hardware is not something I would categorically recommend purchasing in 2026, between rapidly aging hardware and AI-driven price increases. However, for those of us who are behind, it really is a fantastic device to use. Almost anything pre-2019 will work pretty well, and with the endless supply of even older games from the last decade or two frequently discounted in sales, it’s worth not just focusing on the present.

Game franchises like “Yakuza” (now dubbed “Like a Dragon”) and “Resident Evil” run smoothly on the platform. Other older titles, such as “Nier”, “Darksiders” or the massive amount of lesser indie games released over the years, are still worth diving back into. Don’t forget your backlog, because one day it will give you too many choices.

With the Steam Deck running Linux under the SteamOS branch of a distribution called Arch, it can be frustrating to not have local access to certain titles. Since 2021, I have had to explain to readers and viewers that the Steam Deck simply will not allow playing games with strict anti-cheat, because the developers claim that there is a fear of hacking on the open platform. Instead, it’s likely a money issue, as only 3-5% of users tracked on Steam use Linux frequently.

“Fortnite,” “Call of Duty,” and “Destiny 2” are all extremely popular games that either have kernel-level anti-cheat or haven’t flipped the switch. It can be tempting to want to install Windows on the hardware, but trust me: it’s not worth it. The drivers are not the best, or even regularly updated. Performance in popular games is far from great, and using Windows on a handheld has regularly made me fall for Windows 8’s Metro UI (the big tactile buttons).

It’s an overall poor experience and defeats the purpose of the Steam Deck: to console and simplify the PC gaming experience as much as possible. Why would you want to jump into a desktop environment on hardware that barely supports the operating system, by a company trying to establish dominance in the PC space? Seriously, the games you want to play aren’t worth the headache of dual-booting or overwriting the entire Linux installation on the Steam Deck.