Valve's Steam Deck has been remarkably popular and has generated enough interest in the promise of a portable gaming PC that those currently trying to pre-order a Steam Deck may have to wait until late 2022.

When the Steam Deck begins shipping to customers (Valve has said it will begin shipping in late 2021), it will feature a new user interface aimed at making it easier to navigate Steam on mobile devices and 7-inch touchscreens. This week, a Valve developer confirmed that the company also plans to replace its aging Big Picture Mode with the Steam Deck UI, but declined to say when.

This is according to a recent IGN chat with Valve designer Tucker Spofford, who said that the Steam Deck UI is "just Steam," unlike Valve's Big Picture Mode, which is effectively a forked version of Steam, important because it gets all the updates that Steam gets.

"So while Big Picture Mode didn't get all of Steam's recent improvements because development wasn't always easily shared between the two versions, Steam Deck naturally inherits everything," says Spofford. And the features Valve has developed for Deck will also improve Steam in return."

This could be significant, as Big Picture mode has remained largely unchanged for nearly a decade since its debut in 2012. It works well enough when you need to navigate Steam with a gamepad, but it looks crude and lacks important features when compared to most modern console interfaces.

The silver lining is that the Big Picture mode is free of the advertising that clutters modern console interfaces. And, according to IGN's early look at the device, neither is the Steam Deck, which will also offer access to a full Linux desktop for those who want to explore beyond the Deck's Steam UI.

Still, Valve seems to have put a lot of effort into designing Steam Deck's UI to make it easy for users to do things like search for games or quickly jump back to recently played games, etc. The UI also seems to be a good fit for Steam Deck's smaller The UI is also designed to adapt to a variety of screen formats, from the Steam Deck's small 7-inch touchscreen to larger 65-inch TVs and curved gaming monitors, and when the Deck is stored in its official dock, it can connect to external displays via HDMI or DisplayPort. [In other words, there's good reason to expect that playing Steam games on the big screen will be smoother once Big Picture Mode replaces the Steam Deck's UI. The Steam Deck looks great, but Valve's hardware track record is not.