After a few casual evenings with the Nintendo Switch 2, I’m having more fun now than I ever had with the Steam Deck, and I think I know why.
I have been playing a lot of Mario Kart lately. So far, it's been with the same group of friends who play, starting a voice chat directly through the Switch 2, and doing a couple of races every other evening.
I also started a new save in No Man's Sky (I still don't know what I'm supposed to achieve in this game) and Cyberpunk 2077 (which supports cross-progress!), and started slowly going through the backlog of Switch games I bought but never played.
And while spending so much time with the Switch 2, I've been slowly realizing: I enjoy this thing much more than I ever enjoyed the Steam Deck.
I tried to understand why this is the case. After all, the Steam Deck is the much more complete package: it can technically run all Steam games I own–and damn, I own a ton of them–, it can technically emulate all games, even up to the Switch, and when something doesn't run natively, it can technically stream them either through the cloud or on my network.
But I think the problem is in that word "technically". It can technically do it, but to actually make it run, you'll spend a shit ton of time trying to dial everything in, changing settings, and fighting with crashes, hangups and freezes.