Excluding adding an external keyboard and mouse, what quality of life changes can be made to the deck to make keyboard and mouse work less terrible?
I don’t like how soft the tap to click is on the trackpads. I bump the click threshold up to about 9000.
On Desktop mode, I made a controller config that binds the shoulder triggers to just be shoulder triggers. Use the right trackpad as mouse, click as LMB. Left trackpad as scroll wheel (vertical), click as RMB. It would be nice if there was a real 2d scrolly-polly mode that I could bind to the left trackpad, instead of having it emit mousewheel button events.
When it comes to typing on the deck, I cry. It’s terrible. Carry around a folding keyboard if things come to that.
Okay, I feel a little silly for not realizing there was an adjustable threshold on the trackpads - I’ve been avoiding using them because of how touchy they are. (To be fair, I’ve only had my deck for 16 months, lol).
I’m still a bit baffled that the keyboard is so frustrating to use, given how moderately adequate most mobile device keyboards are. I hate to say it, but even MS’s tablet-mode keyboard, as bad as it is, is a substantial upgrade from the deck’s.
I think that the Deck’s touchscreen and keyboard code is just not a priority at all. It has to be barely good enough to type in your wifi password. From there, you scan a QR code to sign in to Steam (which was absolutely an amazing development), and maybe type in four letters to search for a game you want to install.
Direct manipulation of the keyboard is awkward because you aren’t holding the screen very closely like on a phone. Doing that is more like “gorilla-grip one side, and poke keys with your other index finger quickly, before you drop the damn thing”. In addition to that, the keys don’t register very well, possibly because it doesn’t have a phone’s clever DWIM heuristics. And even when you’re trackpad typing, the keyboard laaags, because we only have eight 3.4 ghz logical cores 🤪.
As far as I’m concerned, valve has the right priorities. Keep their noses to the Proton and Vulkan and Gamescope grindstones. Make it so that nobody ever feels the need to wipe and reinstall their system to fix some unfathomable bug. The keyboard can keep right on sucking, so long as “make games just friggin work” moves forward.
Not the answer you’re looking for, but nothing completely replaces a keyboard and mouse. I just use a keyboard and mouse.
