How do you manage your Steam Deck as a family device?

Submitted ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works⁩ to ⁨steamdeck@sopuli.xyz⁩

Hi everyone!

I’ve been a Playstation gamer and a Linux user for years. I now have a Steam Deck to slowly move my gaming to the Linux side too.

For myself, it’s pretty easy, but it’s more complicated with my son.

He’s 8 and I would want him to be able to just take the Deck, use his profile and play with it, wether as a handheld, hooked to the TV with a my Baseus Dock or hooked to the computer screen through USB-C.

So here are my questions:

-Sharing the Steam Library through the Steam Family is easy, but how do you manage this for the settings of the Deck on his profile? Basically, I’d want him to have the same settings as me so that I don’t have to configure anything for him when he wants to play while I’m cooking or busy (controllers through bluetooth, UI scaling, game profiles, etc…). Ideally I would prefer not to have to do everything once again and just have synchonized profiles. Especially because I also have a 12 year daughter who might want to play too and all these things are time consuming. -How do you share your GOG library? Ideally without having to set up Heroic 3 times as we would be 3 users…I’m trying to buy 50% of my games on GOG, but I might just stick to Steam if the sharing part is complicated. Which would be a shame…

The thing is that every difficulty the kids face are just gonna make them want to just keep playing on the Playstation 5 and say “Dad leave us alone with your Linux devices”, so I’d really want the experience to be as seamless as possible.

We used to have a Switch and I’m kind of trying to give them the same ease of use even if I know that it’s clearly not the same device.

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Lemmchen@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
On a normal Linux machine I’d say you could probably copy everything you need from your user’s /home to he, but I’m actually not sure how the Steam Deck handles multiple users. Maybe it is meant for them to use the same system user and only have their profiles in the Steam client, although that would be a terrible idea for privacy.

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_spiffy@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I have an 8 and a 7 year old who both have their own steam accounts as child accounts within my steam family. Both of them have access to a profile on the steam deck(though I have 2 decks so they can each use one at the same time) and they for the most part just work.

The steam user profile changes but the account the steam deck runs on doesn’t. So some things stick around. Controller pairings and the like just work. Steam profile specific configs need to be done multiple times for each user (steam input custom mapping, etc) but I try and mostly stick to deck verified games for my kids because they really do just work.

I had a dock for a while and it also just kinda worked. But I didn’t have to do much tweaking. The dock broke after a while though(jsaux not valve) and I never bothered to replace it since I ended up just installing moonlight in my tv and sunshine on my gaming PC(also Linux).

I don’t have any experience with heroic launcher, but I did set up prism and Minecraft on their profiles and it just worked with the right deck compatible mod bundle.

The biggest issue I have found is sea of thieves will default to whichever the last signed in account is on any profile, so I just signed into it on my daughter’s account and don’t play it on the deck myself.

Docking it made it a bit more complicated for us as well, mostly because the kids don’t know much about the tv inputs and honestly getting them set up would just take me a few seconds to turn it in, grab the charged controllers and get them to the home menu so I never really bothered to teach them it. But that’s a non issue unless I buy another dock at some point in the future. They both prefer to be in mobile mode on the couch anyways.

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- Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Well for now all the kids games were bought on Steam so it’s easy to just use the Steam family.
  
  I guess I’ll stick to Steam games for them and try to get verified ones so that there is almost nothing to set up.
  
  On GOG I only have adult games or old kid games that my kids would probably find too old because it ain’t Fortnite anyway, but I wish it was easy to share things in a family through GOG.
  
  And I know the games are DRM free so I can just copy them, but I wouldn’t want to have multiple installs on my Deck which already doesn’t have enough storage…
  
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  - _spiffy@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    One install is fine! you just need to add it as a non steam game for each different steam account! (assume save progression doesnt matter as much)
    
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semperverus@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I don’t. Handhelds are personal devices, and Steam Decks are cheap. Everyone gets their own.

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- Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I don’t agree as that’s why you can switch profiles.
  
  Also the Deck is cheap, but what’s the point of having 3 devices when only one person is really using it and the kids would just it once in a while.
  
  We have one kitchen so we can have one Deck😅
  
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xylogx@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I let my kids play on my profile, but my kids were already teens when I bought it. The main problem I ran into was when they were playing and I wanted to play online on my pc I had to ask them to go into offline mode. I buy games that they want on my account and they can play online the steamdeck or from their laptop with family sharing.

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- mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  The main problem I ran into was when they were playing and I wanted to play online on my pc I had to ask them to go into offline mode.
  
  You should really just set up family sharing on your Deck, because it solves this problem. They can play your game on their account, which means you’re free to play other games online.
  
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