I have a monitor with awful speakers (thanks Acer), and SteamOS will dutifully switch to them instead of using its own much better speakers. I made a non-steam shortcut with this abomination to kick it back to the internal speakers (manually run it whenever you plug into the dock/external screen).

pactl set-default-sink 'alsa_output.pci-0000_04_00.5-platform-acp5x_mach.0.HiFi__hw_acp5x_1__sink'

I presume that dusty is mad about being in a country that Valve won’t ship to. It’s a perfectly fair gripe.

You should be covering up the etched glass with a screen protector.

Veritus, Arranger, The Last Moon, Mythmatch, Schim, On Your Tail, Pipistrello, Kitsune Tails.

In a visual novel, as another “advance text” button. In Crosscode, I have the “switch elements” arrow keys on the back buttons (you need to flip it on the fly a lot). In some games, I’ll put the B-button action on R4 (particularly when it’s a dodge-roll). If a game needs a random keyboard key out of the blue, I’ll bind it on a paddle.

I think it would come down within an entire SteamOS update. Valve should give it some time in Testing before they push it to everybody in Stable. But they have been known to yolo some really wonky builds on a Friday afternoon and leave your Deck broken all weekend.

Last month had a bunch of great indies hit, I’m still dealing with them. Finished off “Little Kitty Big City” and Cocoon. Working on “Isles of Sea & Sky” and “Dungeon & Puzzles”. Still have yet to really get into Animal Well.

Yep, that’s roughly what I’m seeing. If you’re playing a very light game where the battery would have lasted 7 hours, you will definitely notice the extra drain. If you’re playing a game where the battery was shooting for 3 hours, it makes very little difference.

Is it The End Of Days?

Is EA actually getting … less shitty??

Heroic has definitely had some brown-paper-bag releases. I’ve had to roll back and hold off on Heroic for a lot of their “major” updates.

They don’t allow you to install other OSes?

The worst thing that Valve has done is “the main kernel tree hasn’t gotten around to merging some of the Deck’s EC bits yet”. You could run Batocera or Bazzite on your deck today if you want. You probably don’t want to, those distros aren’t as good an experience as SteamOS yet.

I just tried installing Bazzite on a desktop, and its installer is a hot mess. The most I could get out of it was an error screen at the end, and an unbootable OS. Grub’s config file was just an error message. I couldn’t make heads or tails of how its ostree mess was ever supposed to boot, so I moved on to Debian.

Kinda wish that Valve would just make hall-effect the stock part. My left stick only lasted about a year, while the Gulikit shows no signs of stopping.

Oh god, the design of classic game controllers were all war crimes lol

The more EA breaks their own shitty games, the more powerful Linux becomes

Stardoot

Thanks for doing the work!

When you put the results like that, with 2 to maybe 4% gains, I’m definitely going to pass on undervolting my deck. Back when I had a C2D Macbook - yeah you had to undervolt that sucker to make it usable. But now I will happily leave a 4% boost on the table so that I never have to consider whether a crash came from the undervolt.

The only limitation that I ever saw was - if you’re using a USB-C to USB-A cable to connect to your charger, the deck will say “charging slowly” while pulling absolutely nothing. It will only pull USB-C PD power. If you have a huge battery bank that can put out tons of 9v power on a quickcharge A socket, too bad.

I got a pair of these little Scosche cubes for under $30 at Costco. They’re about 3cm³, non-folding. It’s pretty amazing to have 30w in about the same package as an Apple 5w phone charger.

Other than this, my favourite charger to tuck in the deck case is a folding, flat against the wall 45w puck that is thoroughly discontinued.

Steam did try to hack Wine’s handling of windows textboxes to automatically trigger the OSK. I’m not sure if they gave up there (or I got lucky in disabling it), but it suuucked. It’s very easy to get into fights with that auto-popup, particularly if you’re trying to do wine-tweaking tasks.