If your Steam Deck sits between couch naps and cross-country flights, there’s more you can do with it than just launch games. Over the past few years the Deck has quietly become a do‑it‑all portable PC — and with a few fiddles you can protect the screen, squeeze more performance out of demanding titles, expand storage without a screwdriver, and solve the small headaches that trip up even experienced users.
Five under-the-radar tricks worth learning
These are the kinds of shortcuts and settings you’ll thank yourself for later.
- Install games with the screen off: switch to Desktop Mode (Steam button → Power → Switch to Desktop) before kicking off large downloads. Desktop Mode lets installs continue while the display eventually turns itself off, which reduces OLED burn-in risk — and Valve even shipped a formal low‑power display‑off download mode later on to make this less fiddly.
- Use the right trackpad like a mouse: hold the Steam button and the right trackpad becomes a mouse cursor; triggers act as clicks. It’s a lifesaver for menus and older PC titles that don’t play nice with controllers.
- Rapid brightness control: hold the Steam button and nudge the left stick up or down. Faster than digging through the quick panel.
- Pipe your phone audio into the Deck: pair a phone in Bluetooth settings (toggle Show all devices). Play a podcast or music on your phone and listen through the Deck’s speakers or headphones so the Deck’s CPU stays focused on the game.
- Add a wake lock: under Settings → Security you can require a PIN or a button-sequence to wake the Deck. Handy when the machine is in a bag or a plane seat pocket.
- Deck won’t turn on: try charging for a few minutes (OLED units can power up immediately; LCD models sometimes need a short charge). Hold the power button for 4–7 seconds for a soft restart, or 10–16 seconds for a hard restart. Boot to BIOS (power + volume up) if you suspect firmware trouble.
- Not charging: check the LED at the charging port, try a different charger or outlet, and test Battery Storage Mode from BIOS (it can reset charging circuitry). If the port is dirty, carefully clean it with compressed air.
- Unresponsive buttons: run Settings → Controller → Test Controller Inputs. If the test is fine, remap the game controls. If a specific button fails the test, clean around it gently and consider warranty or repair if it’s hardware failure.
- Stick drift: calibrate (Settings → Controller → Calibration and Advanced Settings → Joysticks) and adjust dead zones. If calibration doesn’t help, debris or wear may be the issue; deep cleaning or part replacement will be required for persistent drift.
- SD card not recognized: format the card via Settings → System → Format SD Card so the Deck can mount it. If formatting fails, try the card in another device; incompatible or faulty cards are common culprits.
- Keep backups of important saves (cloud saves are great when they work).
- Pretend the Deck is a small PC: occasional firmware and OS updates matter.
- Experiment with performance tools like LSFG‑VK, but save a stable profile you can fall back to if something goes sideways.
Crank up performance for heavy games: Lossless Scaling on SteamOS
If a PC port crawls on the Deck, a small but clever community tool can help. Lossless Scaling (specifically the LSFG frame‑generation tech) can multiply perceived frame rates and smooth motion. The native Windows app is paid, but the SteamOS community built an LSFG‑VK compatibility layer that runs on the Deck via the Decky Loader plugin.
How it usually flows:
1. Switch to Desktop Mode and install Decky Loader (run the decky_installer script after you download it). You’ll need your SteamOS sudo password once for the install.
2. Reboot back to Gaming Mode, open the ••• quick menu and find Decky Loader’s plugin store. Install the LSFG‑VK plugin.
3. Add the LSFG launch option to a game’s Properties → General → Launch Options (Decky gives you the exact command to paste).
4. Tweak in‑game: start with Performance Mode and a 2x FPS multiplier, keep FIFO (VSync) on, and dial the Flow Scale until motion looks right. If you see input lag, back off the generation level.
A few caveats from the community: some titles need you to force the Windows version to download (or set a Proton compatibility override) for LSFG to run reliably. Also, higher generation multipliers can introduce latency and instability in some games — tasteful use beats cranking things to the max.
Storage: simple choices that change how you use the Deck
You can spend an hour inside the shell and swap in an NVMe SSD for faster loading and more internal space, or you can go much simpler: use a large, fast microSD card. microSDs are plug‑and‑play and let you hot‑swap entire libraries like old cartridge days. For many players the speed difference is negligible for indies and retro emulation, and the cost-per‑gigabyte is hard to beat. If you prefer to keep things internal, an SSD improves load times and helps with some modern ports. If you want an easy place to start, pick up a high‑speed card (available on Amazon) and test whether the Deck’s performance meets your needs before opening it up.
Quick fixes for common headaches
Most problems have a software or tiny-hardware fix before you consider service.
A few smart habits
The Deck’s ecosystem is one of slow, steady refinement — Valve and the community keep adding capabilities that reward a little curiosity. If you’ve been treating yours like a handheld-only device, try a couple of the tricks above and you might be surprised how much more useful and resilient it becomes. For context on how central Steam is to this experience — and why tinkering matters — consider how developers view distribution and platform power in the PC space: most still point to Steam as dominant, for better or worse as recent developer surveys show.
If you want a walkthrough for any specific step (Decky install, LSFG launch options, or which microSD specs to buy), tell me which model you have and I’ll tailor the steps to your Deck.