So I have had Valve's funky little handheld gaming computer for a little over a year now. I love it. I've beaten more games on it within a year than on the gaming PC I've had since ~2015. But holy shit, troubleshooting on the Steam Deck is the worst I've ever had to experience.

If all you plan on using the Deck for is playing green checkmark "Verified 100% Works" games, you'll never have a problem. But if you want to use emulators or a non-steam game that doesn't gel with Proton, something's going to fuck up beyond your control. Over the year I've had my fair share of the console just randomly not entering sleep mode, not waking up from sleep mode, crashing while resetting between Desktop/Gaming mode, and no real understanding of what I did to cause that to happen.

If the game crashes due to an issue on the Steam-end you aren't given an error code and you're stuck googling "steam deck game crashes suddenly", where you'll undoubtedly be met with the usual machine generated revenue trap articles telling you the usual garbage that you need to restart your system, check for updates, format your drive, or order a replacement Deck. Frustratingly, not even the official forums will yield better answers.

The reason I made this little rant is because yesterday I got a 1TB microSD card, and for some reason it simply wouldn't recognize the card when I tried to replace it with my old SD. And not only that, when I had the 1TB card inserted, games on the internal storage wouldn't launch either. I eventually found people who had the exact same issue as me, and just like with every other issue, the commenters suggest restarting, checking for updates, formatting, and ordering a replacement. Ugh. Every time I see a tech support thread and someone tells the OP to factory reset or RMA I want to make a burner account just to tell that guy to fuck off.

Anyways, fortunately I didn't do anything with my old SD card and everything works fine again with that one still inserted. I'm sure I'll be slapping my forehead when I discover the real solution, but until then it feels like I'm wading through a bayou of bots and redditors who are just trying to trick tech-illiterate people into screwing themselves even further.

I still love this device but what the fuck is up with this troubleshooting scene.

LATE UPDATE: I fixed it last Thursday, just in time for the family Thanksgiving dinner. It turned out the issue was that I'd moved the Compatdata folder to the old MicroSD and forgot about it. For some reason when you uninstall a game, it doesn't delete any files that it added to the Compatdata and Shadercache folder so you need to either nuke those folders every couple hundred installs or move them to the SD so your deck won't shit itself from low disk space.

Unfortunately reassigning the Compatdata folder to the new SD wasn't enough either. I had to make an "in case of emergency" Compatdata folder in the internal drive, nuke the Compatdata folder that was in the new SD that must've contained some flags that tripped up Steam, and only then could I reassign everything to the new SD. If you look up the definition of "Cumbersome" you'll get some Truman Show candid video of me having done all this crap.

And also my Surface Pro is running out of hard drive space so I'll likely need to shell out cash for another 1TB for this sucker (assuming Microshit hasn't been installing bloatware that I'll have to remove again)