You can use a keyboard and mouse with the steam deck. Probably not super common but definitely doable.

It's not a standard xbox controller. There's a gyro with several ways to handle it, including flick, which does take a little time to get used to, but works really well as a mouse substitution for such an environment. Some people are just that good with a thumbstick as well and can easily enjoy casual gamemodes.

Steam Deck is a capable beast, even for a game like Counter-Strike.

Some games have controller-based matchmaking, where you hop in a lobby and only people with similar controllers to your get matched against you. So if you play with keyboard and mouse, you play against keyboard and mouse players. If you play with a controller, you play against other people with controllers. With crossplay getting more and more popular, I think every game should have this option.

Maybe, maybe not. But I think people expect a game made by Valve to run on gaming hardware made by Valve, even if it's only for casual playing.

I'm not sure if it's every game but I don't recall ever seeing my deck compile shaders, I thought it just downloaded them

CS2 just doesn't precompile shaders. The game just shits itself running on AMD because of that.

The shader cache itself is also broken and gets reset by the game on every restart.

I like to play all my games on the deck and just dock it for shooters. If they were serious about cs this time they'd optimize it. A lot of people including me still have PC's less powerful than the deck. Plus a competitive game needs to be optimized well enough to run smoothly.

It's a new engine, which is more than enough to warrant a new title imo. CS has been practically the same game many years and has been incredibly successful all that time. The community does not want major gameplay changes, just minor improvements. CS as a series is not like COD or Battlefield.

CS2 has much more advanced and consistent smokes, vastly improved graphics, more advanced netcode, competitive improvments alongside a new competitive mode similar to FaceIT, and loads of quality of life improvements. I think this is more than enough to be considered a sequel.

CS2 is on Source engine 2. Hence the major version bump.

The difference between csgo and cs2 is similar to cs 1.6 to cs source. Its a major change of engine with brings in other changes with it.