I've been blindly developing for the Steam Deck all year, so I'm relieved to see it working so well out of the box with my own eyes! Anything that needs fine-tuning can now happen under my watch, ensuring that PC gaming remains part of my portable revolution. As with the Switch, I set aside a lot of time - and endured a lot of abuse - to keep my games light enough to ride this wave. By the time this tech becomes commonplace, I hope to have a whole series of games that are getting the best out of it.
So far I've only encountered 2 issues:
1) It's a good job the speed option went live in v1.4.9 because it turns out the Steam Deck NEEDS to run at a speed between 101-200%! The animation chokes at 100%, but changing it to so much as 101% knocks it into shape. Now that I know, this will be easy to fix in the next update.
2) Synching with your desktop via the cloud currently inherits some non-existent controller preferences instead of prioritizing the Deck itself. Again this is easy to fix now I've seen it, but in the meantime simply head to the Options > Cast > Controllers option to confirm you're playing on a handheld.