I’ve been heavily debating between Steam Deck OLED and Switch OLED. My initial thought was getting a Switch OLED, let someone mod it and then download games on it (I don’t care about Nintendo’s Online).

Then I got told it might be better to get Steam Deck OLED and use emulation on it for switch games.

Now I’ve been a bit of researching on both and it seems that Steam Deck runs Linux and that the emulation isn’t really as good as it is on the PC. I don’t have any knowledge on Linux either, plus most of my games are pirated (thus Steam Library isn’t really a thing for me).

Getting the Switch OLED modded going to cost me about €150 but then I’ve been reading that the games are mostly 30FPS locked and that using cheats and/ or mods is a bit of a hassle (similar thing with getting games on it through piracy).

Price wise; Steam Deck OLED going to cost me at least €680 while Switch OLED will cost me €350 (and when Switch 2 comes it might be on sale).

I was wondering what the opinions are on Piracy community here. Which one do you recommend out of the two and why, how true are the things of what I’ve been told and read?

Note; Yes, I would like to get the Switch 2 but since it’ll take a while before it can get hacked/ modded - I don’t want to get it. I refuse to pay €60-70 for each game while they’re like 7 years old.

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[–] Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It’s super easy on the steam deck. You don’t need to know Linux. You boot into desktop mode, open Firefox, install emudeck by clicking on a link. Then you configure in there a bit and download roms - all pretty straightforward and easy. A noob can do it in a couple of hours.

Now that said - the steam deck is hit or miss emulating switch games. Most games work awesome. But not every game. It’s not clear to me if the hardware is a little too slow for emulation overhead, or if it’s more an issue between the emulator and the game. My take is it’s a bit of both.

Someone else will have to comment on modding the switch as I haven’t done that, but I bet once modded, it plays every game 100% fine.

Assuming my prior paragraph is true: if the ONLY thing you want to do is switch games - then I’d skip the steam deck. If you want to do OTHER things as well (snes, nes, all other older consoles, actual pc games that play on steam deck) then ya, steam deck all the way. Make sense?

[–] ddash@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 4 days ago

Theres also the thing that there are different emulators for the Switch available, emudeck installs Ryujinx. It seems for some games performance can vary on the SteamDeck with different emulators, and maybe some games run better with something that is Yuzu-based, e.g. the Citron emulator. So if you are happy to experiment you could probably find a good solution for most games.