You can tweak and (hard and soft) mod a Steam Deck as well.
… Your starting point is just more powerful hardware, and a much more permissive software system that basically begs you to do whatever you want to it, compared to a Switch.
I get that this level of modding if a Switch is an accomplishment, because it is more challenging… that the modding itself is what is enjoyable for many people.
But many other people enjoy a different proportion of ‘tinkering’ to ‘actually using it’. Or different kinds of tinkering.
Like… I have an OLED Deck. For me, running RPCS3 is… well, I could either dl the flatpak of it and configure it myself, or let Emu/RetroDeck take care of that, or switch over from SteamOS 3 to Bazzite, set up a distrobox instance of Fedora (what Bazzite is built off of), then just literally download all the source code and required libraries… and completely compile the entire emulator myself, on the Steam Deck itself.
I actually did this with O3DE and Godot a few times… a bit buggy, but hey, its a fun way for me to get more familiar with just… how compiling works, as well as the Fedora ecosystem… most of my previous experience with compiling/development is within Debian based distros.
You can literally develop a game, in Godot, or Unity, or many 2D only/mostly FOSS engines… on a Steam Deck.
As far as hard modding?
A year (or two?) back now… somebody figured out that you can actually take the SSD out of a Steam Deck, run the OS from the microSD card… add an adapter to the SSD slot, and then connect that to a full, PC grade eGPU with its own power supply… and this requires you to actually physically cut out (or I guess remove the entire) a part of the back exterior housing.
But, if you can do all this, you now have basically a hyper charged Steam Deck with waaay more rendering power you can basically use as a decently powerful desktop PC…
But, this only works with Windows (running off of the microSD card), and your Deck is… no longer really portable, unless you consider detaching the eGPU and SSD adapter thingy, putting the SSD back in, and put a standard backplate back on the thing… as an acceptable level of portability, lol.
Less … nearly insane … degrees of hardware modding are things like swapping out the joycons with halleffect sticks, custom body shells (the translucent atomic purple n64 style ones are quite popular, and the translucence actually helps a bit with heat dissipation),
…custom colored button and dpads… sort of … skin like wraps for the touchpads, or whole bodyshell… semi squishy grip style wraps that can help if you have larger, or injured hands/wrists…
…oh right, the LCD variants have some fairly popular entire screen replacements that give you a higher resolution than the native screen… not sure if anything like that exists for the OLED variants yet.
I think its awesome that someone modded a Switch this hard, I think its awesome the person I replied to loves their modded handhelds, and I am just sharing my own tales of modding and tinkering with the Deck to show what you can do with it as well, and how I angle my goals of modding a bit differently than the person I’m replying to, so its a better fit for me.
I did not at any point state that their approach to modding is any kind of wrong or inferior.
You can tweak and (hard and soft) mod a Steam Deck as well.
… Your starting point is just more powerful hardware, and a much more permissive software system that basically begs you to do whatever you want to it, compared to a Switch.
I get that this level of modding if a Switch is an accomplishment, because it is more challenging… that the modding itself is what is enjoyable for many people.
But many other people enjoy a different proportion of ‘tinkering’ to ‘actually using it’. Or different kinds of tinkering.
Like… I have an OLED Deck. For me, running RPCS3 is… well, I could either dl the flatpak of it and configure it myself, or let Emu/RetroDeck take care of that, or switch over from SteamOS 3 to Bazzite, set up a distrobox instance of Fedora (what Bazzite is built off of), then just literally download all the source code and required libraries… and completely compile the entire emulator myself, on the Steam Deck itself.
I actually did this with O3DE and Godot a few times… a bit buggy, but hey, its a fun way for me to get more familiar with just… how compiling works, as well as the Fedora ecosystem… most of my previous experience with compiling/development is within Debian based distros.
You can literally develop a game, in Godot, or Unity, or many 2D only/mostly FOSS engines… on a Steam Deck.
As far as hard modding?
A year (or two?) back now… somebody figured out that you can actually take the SSD out of a Steam Deck, run the OS from the microSD card… add an adapter to the SSD slot, and then connect that to a full, PC grade eGPU with its own power supply… and this requires you to actually physically cut out (or I guess remove the entire) a part of the back exterior housing.
But, if you can do all this, you now have basically a hyper charged Steam Deck with waaay more rendering power you can basically use as a decently powerful desktop PC…
But, this only works with Windows (running off of the microSD card), and your Deck is… no longer really portable, unless you consider detaching the eGPU and SSD adapter thingy, putting the SSD back in, and put a standard backplate back on the thing… as an acceptable level of portability, lol.
Less … nearly insane … degrees of hardware modding are things like swapping out the joycons with halleffect sticks, custom body shells (the translucent atomic purple n64 style ones are quite popular, and the translucence actually helps a bit with heat dissipation),
…custom colored button and dpads… sort of … skin like wraps for the touchpads, or whole bodyshell… semi squishy grip style wraps that can help if you have larger, or injured hands/wrists…
…oh right, the LCD variants have some fairly popular entire screen replacements that give you a higher resolution than the native screen… not sure if anything like that exists for the OLED variants yet.
“How dare other people want to mod a different device than what I would!”
… I am just trying to ‘yes, and!’ this.
I think its awesome that someone modded a Switch this hard, I think its awesome the person I replied to loves their modded handhelds, and I am just sharing my own tales of modding and tinkering with the Deck to show what you can do with it as well, and how I angle my goals of modding a bit differently than the person I’m replying to, so its a better fit for me.
I did not at any point state that their approach to modding is any kind of wrong or inferior.
No worries mate. Have at it. It’s good fun for everyone that tinkers.