A nice SteamOS update pushed Steam Deck’s OS to a new version of KDE Plasma, enhanced desktop mode, and added a lot of useful things you’ll want to take advantage of.it incorporates things from February (opens in new tab), June (opens in new tab)When October (opens in new tab) Plasma update.
The biggest feature for casual users is like the new swipe gestures for using Deck’s touchscreen. A directional swipe from the edge of the screen opens the desktop grid, overview, windows, and the desktop itself. You can also synchronize the accent color of your desktop with the dominant color of your wallpaper. This is a lot of fun when paired with today’s photography features.
Another great thing is the new support for a set of highly customizable system tray widgets in KDE Plasma. You can customize this for a better battery implementation, change the text size to best suit mobile devices, or add text next to the icon.
Otherwise, this update tweaked sleep issues where “on a small number of titles, certain games would freeze or exhibit glitchy behavior after waking up”. There are also some pretty neat new performance tweaks, such as specifically allowing screen tearing so that lag can be minimized.
By the way, for all of you who were hoping to get your Switch controller working again, your wish came true a few days ago. The Hotfix now recognizes them, so take your Pro Controllers or whatever and go to town.
You can find the full patch notes with steam. (opens in new tab)