this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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Steam Hardware

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How do you manage your Steam Deck as a family device? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 2 months ago by Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works to c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
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Hi everyone!

I've been a Playstation gamer and a Linux user for years. I now have a Steam Deck to slowly move my gaming to the Linux side too.

For myself, it's pretty easy, but it's more complicated with my son.

He's 8 and I would want him to be able to just take the Deck, use his profile and play with it, wether as a handheld, hooked to the TV with a my Baseus Dock or hooked to the computer screen through USB-C.

So here are my questions:

-Sharing the Steam Library through the Steam Family is easy, but how do you manage this for the settings of the Deck on his profile? Basically, I'd want him to have the same settings as me so that I don't have to configure anything for him when he wants to play while I'm cooking or busy (controllers through bluetooth, UI scaling, game profiles, etc..). Ideally I would prefer not to have to do everything once again and just have synchonized profiles. Especially because I also have a 12 year daughter who might want to play too and all these things are time consuming. -How do you share your GOG library? Ideally without having to set up Heroic 3 times as we would be 3 users..I'm trying to buy 50% of my games on GOG, but I might just stick to Steam if the sharing part is complicated. Which would be a shame..

The thing is that every difficulty the kids face are just gonna make them want to just keep playing on the Playstation 5 and say "Dad leave us alone with your Linux devices", so I'd really want the experience to be as seamless as possible.

We used to have a Switch and I'm kind of trying to give them the same ease of use even if I know that it's clearly not the same device.

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[–] Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Well for now all the kids games were bought on Steam so it’s easy to just use the Steam family.

I guess I’ll stick to Steam games for them and try to get verified ones so that there is almost nothing to set up.

On GOG I only have adult games or old kid games that my kids would probably find too old because it ain’t Fortnite anyway, but I wish it was easy to share things in a family through GOG.

And I know the games are DRM free so I can just copy them, but I wouldn’t want to have multiple installs on my Deck which already doesn’t have enough storage..

[–] _spiffy@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 months ago

One install is fine! you just need to add it as a non steam game for each different steam account! (assume save progression doesnt matter as much)

[–] Mugmoor@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 months ago

GOG games are DRM free, pretty easy to share with family. Saves might be tricker on a single deck, but the game itself may have multiple save slots.