Make sure you install the latest Steam Deck October update

Giovanni Colantonio / Digital Trends

Valve released a large Steam Deck update this week successful nan Stable transmission that nan institution says tin amended capacity for its handheld crossed nan board, and moreover assistance up to 10% much artillery life for nan original Steam Deck successful definite situations.

The shaper releases accordant hotfixes and mini updates to nan Steam Deck beta channel, but they usually hole a mates of things that astir players typically won’t notice. However, SteamOS 3.6.19 is huge, pinch countless updates acknowledgment successful portion to 2 large changes: a move to a much caller Arch Linux base, and an update to Mesa 24.1 for nan graphics driver.

There are a batch of fixes, truthful we won’t get into each of them, but each of this will let for faster OS updates successful nan future, amended nan reliability of microSD, SD cards, and different hardware; instrumentality improved betterment successful nan arena of immoderate crashes, and updated nan wide responsiveness of nan Steam UI. Players who for illustration to usage desktop mode will besides get an update to KDE Plasma 5.27.10. This wasn’t a immense fix, but it’ll thief to alteration thumbnail previews for videos successful nan record launcher and hole crashing issues.

Both nan Steam Deck OLED and LCD sewage this update, though location are mini differences. It’s decidedly thing LCD owners will want to install, though, arsenic 1 of nan large slug points involves artillery life improvements that tin perchance lengthen nan runtime of your handheld by “up to 10% successful ray load situations.” They’ll besides get overclocking controls if you don’t attraction astir artillery life and want to maximize performance. For OLED owners, location are Bluetooth improvements and a hole to a representation leak problem for users connected 3.5.

Interestingly, buried successful nan spot notes is simply a slug constituent that says, “Added support for other ROG Ally keys.” Does this mean that we’ll beryllium getting SteamOS connected different platforms successful nan future? Maybe connected its competitor, nan Asus ROG Ally? We’ll person to hold and see.