I Dual Booted My Steam Deck
2In this short clip I show that I dual-booted my Steam Deck with Windows 11. THIS IS NOT A TUTORIAL! I am not showing all of the steps how I did it, as there's already a ton of videos out there to show how to do that. With Windows 11 installed I was able to install 36 awesome side-scrolling games [2:23] and made my Steam Deck into a dream come true. With Windows 11 installed, I did not have to mess around with the Proton Compatibility Layer as you do when you boot into the default Linux based Steam OS. The Steam Deck is powerful enough to run AAA games at the lowest graphical settings, but for side-scrollers it can pretty much run everything at maximum and with 60 frames per second.
Now Valve has released a statement that Dual Booting is not officially supported on the Steam Deck. However that is more of a play on words than actual fact. Two Operating Systems can't currently be on the same main hard drive. It is true that it can't be dual-booted on the main SSD or hard drive, however it can boot to another separate OS by using the MMC SD card slot.
To get to the dual-boot menu after installing Windows 11 to the SD Card shut down the Steam Deck comepletely [0:14]. Then you reach the dual-boot menu by holding the Volume Down + Power Button together until you hear the Steam Deck Chime [0:38], then release the Power button but keep holding down the volume down button until the dual-boot menu appears (usually ten to 15 seconds). From there choose the MMC SD Card option to boot to your other installed OS (Windows 11 in my case).
I have the highest configured Steam Deck version:
AMD APU
CPU: Zen 2 4c/8t, 2.4-3.5GHz (up to 448 GFlops FP32)
GPU: 8 RDNA 2 CUs, 1.0-1.6GHz (up to 1.6 TFlops FP32)
APU power: 4-15W
RAM
16 GB LPDDR5 on-board RAM (5500 MT/s quad 32-bit channels)
Storage
512 GB high-speed NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4 or PCIe Gen 3 x2*)
1280 x 800px (16:10 aspect ratio) Optically bonded IPS LCD
7" diagonal
Brightness
400 nits typical
Refresh rate
60Hz