I think that the Deck’s touchscreen and keyboard code is just not a priority at all. It has to be barely good enough to type in your wifi password. From there, you scan a QR code to sign in to Steam (which was absolutely an amazing development), and maybe type in four letters to search for a game you want to install.

Direct manipulation of the keyboard is awkward because you aren’t holding the screen very closely like on a phone. Doing that is more like “gorilla-grip one side, and poke keys with your other index finger quickly, before you drop the damn thing”. In addition to that, the keys don’t register very well, possibly because it doesn’t have a phone’s clever DWIM heuristics. And even when you’re trackpad typing, the keyboard laaags, because we only have eight 3.4 ghz logical cores 🤪.

As far as I’m concerned, valve has the right priorities. Keep their noses to the Proton and Vulkan and Gamescope grindstones. Make it so that nobody ever feels the need to wipe and reinstall their system to fix some unfathomable bug. The keyboard can keep right on sucking, so long as “make games just friggin work” moves forward.