Valve is working on improving the docked experience when using a Steam Deck with an external monitor.
With the release of the official Steam Deck Dock, Valve is working hard on better compatibility with their own and third-party docks.
The latest update pushed to the Stable Client today adds a safe mode for external displays. When enabled, the Steam Deck will pick a lower resolution when connecting to an external display, which "may help in some cases where the external display has issues".
This update also increases the supported length of the boot animation video from ten to thirty seconds (here is a guide showing the easiest way to add these videos).
You can find the full changelog below:
General
- The Quick Access Menu will now open to the notifications tab when you have new friend chat messages, game invites, or voice chat invites
- Notifications for Game Invites in the Quick Access Menu now have an option in the footer to accept them without having to navigate to the chat window
- Added External Display Safe Mode to developer settings. When enabled, the next time an external display is plugged in Steam Deck will pick a low resolution configuration, which may help in some cases where the external display has issues.
- Increase boot animation max length from 10 seconds to 30 seconds
Added controller-specific glyphs on the Lock screen
- Don't show the "switch to desktop" option in the power menu when the lock screen is active.
- Fixed an issue where Steam group chats with long names or descriptions could cause break the layout of the chat screen
- Fixed an issue on the Lock screen where you'd have to dismiss the On-Screen Keyboard manually if you slept the device while it was up
- Fixed invoking the On-Screen-Keyboard while already in a full-screen keyboard input scenario causing bad behavior.
- Fixed a case where the Performance Overlay would still show when set to off.
Steam Input
- Restore the previous behavior of using stick deflection rather than the capacitive sensor for Radial Menus that don't have center buttons bound
- Fixed an in-game crash
- Fixed an issue with editing command settings from inside the virtual menu screen
