In brief: Valve’s Steam Deck is already a great software, however the company continues to update it with unusual software patches, each bringing fresh enhancements, trojan horse fixes, and tweaks. Yesterday’s Deck update was one of its greatest yet. It added several notable unusual features, along side a lock screen, keyboard localization, and more.
The update, aptly titled the “Lock Screen Update,” is available now to all Deck Owners. You can read the plump changelog right here, however we will paddle over the broad strokes below, starting with the greatest inclusion: the lock screen.
This screen will not be mandatory, however you can optionally living it to display after you wake the machine up from sleep, on boot, on login, or when switching to Desktop Mode (or a combination of these).
Ought to you want to guard your software from prying eyes should serene it gain misplaced or stolen, it be probably a lawful idea to swap this feature on. When you develop, you may be brought on to living a six-digit pin, which can be entered with the Deck’s touch screen or physical controls.
Another major upgrade to the Deck journey is the unusual “A couple of Window Switching” feature. MWS allows you to swap between active dwelling windows for apps that use them. For example, for those that have to split your browser tabs into separate dwelling windows (perhaps for dual display screen viewing), this feature would allow you to fast swap between them. The same goes for games with launchers or utterly different necessary background dwelling windows — such as Dwarf Fortress.
Varied smaller however serene notable Deck changes encompass battery optimizations, a unusual Achievement UI for Steam games, the likelihood to uncap the machine’s framerate, support for Windows 11 installations (thanks to the newly-added fTPM support), and a unusual “Half-Rate Shading” toggle, which forces “2×2” VRS for “vitality savings.”
Last however not least, Valve has added support for keyboard localization. For your Deck’s Settings menu, you may be able to enable as a lot as 21 languages for your keyboard, which you can swap between on the flit the use of a unusual on-screen globe icon.
You can reserve a Steam Deck of your delight in starting at $399, however your present seemingly may not be available till Q3 2022.
