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. 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.
So this post is detailing how I set it up and got it to a pretty solid place for anyone else to imitate.
So first thing is first: If a game can run on SteamOS and runs well, I highly suggest you just play it on SteamOS.
Even 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. 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.
Installation
That out of the way, the first step here is to figure out where you want to install your windows.
There are two general approaches: Dual-Booting and External Drive. 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.
I used this guide to get Windows 11 running on an SD card, although not the whole guide. 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 decided to go with Windows 11 because it seems that the windows on deck forums believe it is the most compatible. 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. Additionally I am unsure if every tool I will link in this post works for Windows 10 as well as 11.
Drivers and Tools
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)
This script will handle automatically grabbing and installing all the steam drivers for windows, including some fixed versions of the drivers.
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)
It will also install a cavalcade of common tools used to tune the Windows system. 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. These tools though are what make the controller palatable on windows and help control things like the fan noise.
SteamDeckTools
If you ran the above script you will have Steam Deck Tools installed already. If you didn't, you should go get them here.
Steam Deck Tools includes 4 different programs, and the two most important ones are Steam Fan Control and Steam Controller.
Steam Fan Control allows you to change how the fans operate. By default on windows there is no fan curve on the deck, which means the fans will sound like a jet as you use them. With Steam Fan Control you can tell it to use the SteamOS fan curve, which will mimic the fan curve on regular SteamOS. You can do this by right clicking on the icon for it in the windows tray, and changing the fan control to SteamOS.
Steam Controller replaces the need for SWIDC or Glossy, and you should uninstall those before installing the Steam Controller.
The Steam Controller tool provides a mapping of the controller on the deck in two modes: Desktop and Xbox360. In Desktop mode you can use the steam deck controller as a mouse and KB directly and use it to navigate the computer. In Xbox360 mode it will act as an Xbox 360 controller when dealing with buttons that a 360 controller normally has.
Steam Controller also adds a bunch of Shortcuts to the controller that mimic the shortcuts and such from SteamOS (and add a few other nice ones) that can be found here.
Basically the Steam Controller gets you the closest to the controller experience in SteamOS.
User Hacks
With the above two setup, you will have a perfectly functional Windows on Deck machine.
However, there are a few other hacks I suspect people will find useful in setting up their deck.
The first one is Autologin: instructions.
Autologin will make it so you don't need to put in your password when launching into windows, and with a few extra commands, also stop you from having to enter your password after recovering from Sleep.
Obviously that comes with some security caveats, but its up to you to decide if its worth enabling.
The second one is the On Screen Keyboard. By default in Windows the OSK is one that is designed to be used with a mouse and not a touch screen, but you can force windows to use the Touch Screen version. Instructions here
Finally the third thing is using O&O Shutup 10++.
This tool lets you disable a lot of the tracking and telemetry stuff in Windows, and even lets you disable Automatic Windows Update entirely. Its up to you how much you would want to nuke here, personally I've nuked almost all of it.
UMA Buffer
The final section here is about the UMA Buffer. Instructions on how to change it can be found here
To explain what this is: The OS will dedicate a certain amount of RAM to map to the GPU while its running. SteamOS apparently handles this dynamically somehow or adjusts as needed, but Windows can not.
Changing this Minimum Buffer Size basically forces Windows to allocate more space in RAM to the GPU. Going from 1GB up to 4GB. This should make it so games that rely more heavily on the GPU perform better.
This setting is completely reversible and should never have any permanent adverse affects on your machine. The only downside that changing this can have is that it may make games that are more CPU bound rather than GPU bound perform worse. However, you can just change the setting if you think that is the case and reboot the machine.
