There are a lot of great decky plugins, but which one specifically is the most important to you?
I really enjoy How Long to Beat. It’s nice getting to know beforehand if I’m about to open a 10h casual game or a 120h massive undertaking, specially given the portable nature of the Deck.
Vibrant Deck is nice because it bumps up the colors a bit and makes it seem almost OLED, but I think the actual best is Proton DB Badges. This plugin tells you if a game is compatible (and how compatible) with the steam deck. Steam official playability is notoriously conservative, plus Proton DB can tell you what might not work in a game.
I used to really enjoy Vibrant Deck, but it doesn’t play nice with the night light feature. Now I’m using the pre-release of SteamOS 3.5, and there’s a native vibrancy slider that works.
Still, glad the developer launched the plugin and allowed us to enjoy better colors for a long while before Valve did it themselves.
Yes this is the one that made me put in a little effort to get decky installed and the extra vibrancy made a really big difference for the screen. It’s not oled but such a huge improvement over what it was.
Shameless plug but I just re-released my Volume Mixer plugin to the store. It allows you to control the volume of games, programs, and connected Bluetooth sources like phones. I use it all the time since I usually have a podcast or stream going on my phone while playing a game
Thanks for making that plugin! I actually just downloaded the new update for it shortly before making this post.
How does deck + phone work? Your phone uses the speakers on the deck for playback?
Yup! The Steam Deck (or Linux really) lets you use it as a Bluetooth speaker. So I connect my phone to the Deck and my AirPods to the deck and can listen to anything that’s playing through my phone and the deck through my headphones.
Holy heck gonna have to give this a look.
My personal favorite is Pause Games. Not only does it fix sound issues with sleep in most games, but it allows me to run multiple games at once and swap between them without it hurting performance/battery.
Completely agree, pause games is the only one that helped me get through GTA 5! Didn’t even think to use it to run multiple games
Hadn’t heard of this before, does it affect standby time at all?
Nope, deck sleeps like normal, just with fewer sleep related issues.
Will have to install it
I’ve been playing Persona 5 and it’s such a pain when I get the audio crackling in the middle of a palace where I can’t save all the time to reboot
CSS loader and SteamGrid db. Just being able to change the ui is so worth it.
Steam grid dB is awesome. Especially for non steam games I added to make it look much more visually stunning without much effort.
cannot get the CSS loader to work properly tho
Probably AutoFlatpaks so that updating all my Flatpaks is automatic and doesn’t require switching to desktop mode.
Autoflatpaks is great, but I don’t think it updates all of my flatpaks. Seems like whenever I do switch to desktop I always have a bunch that are not updated even though autoflatpaks has been downloading updates regularly.
Yeah, I’ve had this experience as well.
The ProtonDB one. It’s what I wanted Crankshaft for so.
Mine is vibrantdeck. It improved the image quality quite significantly. I think the option is now built in, but I don’t bother.
