These tools though are what make the controller palatable on windows and help control things like the fan noise. Most of these you don't need to use, but the most important one it will install is the SteamDeckTools package, which I will describe in the next section. It will also install a cavalcade of common tools used to tune the Windows system. On top of that it will set up some default tweaks on your system to make it less likely to have issues (such as disabling GameDVR which can cause BSOD) This script will handle automatically grabbing and installing all the steam drivers for windows, including some fixed versions of the drivers. Once you have a fresh install of Windows 11, the easiest way for you to get set up is to use this setup script (Needs to be run as an admin)

Additionally I am unsure if every tool I will link in this post works for Windows 10 as well as 11.

With Windows 11 the Wifi works out of the box (Windows 10 requires you to manually get the drivers), which makes the remaining steps much easier. I decided to go with Windows 11 because it seems that the windows on deck forums believe it is the most compatible. I only used the sections on how to make an ISO image into a bootable install on an SD card, and did not do any of the driver/tool installation instructions, leaving that up to a different task. I used this guide to get Windows 11 running on an SD card, although not the whole guide. There are guides out there for both, with pros and cons, but I personally right now am using a 512GB microSD card to run Windows 11 and it seems to work fine. There are two general approaches: Dual-Booting and External Drive.

That out of the way, the first step here is to figure out where you want to install your windows. I think using Windows on the steam deck only really makes a ton of sense specifically for GamePass games and for steam games that just do not work at all on Proton. So first thing is first: If a game can run on SteamOS and runs well, I highly suggest you just play it on SteamOS.Įven with windows set up as best as it can be, SteamOS is still much more better designed to be a console OS than windows is. So this post is detailing how I set it up and got it to a pretty solid place for anyone else to imitate. With the looming christmas holidays coming up though I decided to set it up again in order to play a few games while traveling, and it is in a much, much, better place now with community tools. A while ago I tried to set up windows on my steam deck so that I could play some game pass games, but it ended up being sort of annoying after setting it up so I never really used it.

Steam deck game pass