For trackball, I personally find a finger controlled trackball much more intuitive and easy to use compared to a thumb controlled one. The trackpads on the deck and steam controller are great, but they generally are thumb only unless you have some really funky grip.
You can use any mouse. Also after an initial learning curve, trackball mice are a very couch friendly mouse.
It’s cool that the switch 2 has a mouse mode, but it’s not very ergonomic and it’s pretty limited in terms of comfortable inputs.
Ars Technica is generally excellent in my experience, one of the better tech news websites.
It’s distributed through flatpak, so yes, it’s available on Ubuntu or any linux distro that supports flatpak.
It is focused on controller support, so it might not be ideal for an ubuntu desktop computer, but that just depends on your use case.
According to the article this has a built in adblocker.
That can work with any website, so you can probably just install jellyfin, have your local media hosted at 127.0.0.1:8188, and play that in the picture in picture plugin.
I think it was supported really early on (or was supposed to be supported), but it hasn’t worked for basically the entire time I’ve had my Deck. I don’t play with keyboard very often so it never impacted me, but I know I’ve heard people complain about it.
SimplyDeckyTDP has a few features that specifically care about the sleep and resume features. You can disable setting the TDP when resuming, as well as disable any suspend actions. For me, the most useful setting is configuring the max TDP when resuming from sleep. You can encounter audio stutters when resuming games sometimes, and forcing the maximum TDP when waking the Steam Deck gets around those issues.
That’s interesting, I don’t run into that issue often, but I know some games have issues with it. The pause games decky plugin already can fix some of those, but worth remembering this plugin as well for when people have trouble with that.
I’ve had Sekiro on my wishlist for a long time because a lot of people consider it the best souls like game. I know the main point with it is that it’s supposed to be more parry focused, you’re expected to really learn and master enemy attack patterns and parry/counter windows. The first playthrough is supposed to be able slow/steady progress and learning, and then on a second playthrough you apparently feel like a god who’s mastered an intricate dance and can’t be stopped.
At least that’s how it was described to me, but as far as the smaller “what do I do now” level I don’t know what to tell you with my general lack of souls experience.
There was a performance mod being passed around that I tried earlier, it had some significant performance gains but had some serious downsides like some fabric would lose physics and just stick straight out, and things like the paint bridges were completely invisible.
Valve employees are given time to work on self selected projects. I’m guessing that leads to more new projects than people taking over maintenance of existing projects.
Stellar Blade is UE4, while Wukong is UE5.
UE5 performance is pretty bad on nearly every game it’s in unfortunately.
Yeah, I don’t mention it very often anymore, but I’m always playing HSR on the side. I’m glad hoyo games work so well on the Deck.
I saw that water-cooled deck, I really love those unhinged deck mods like that. The Doom promo art is also amazing.
I thought it was pretty interesting that NineSols and Bō launched so close to each other with such similar themes. I wonder if that hurt or helped sales. Usually a close release to another similar game would hurt you, but I could imagine that people who enjoyed one of them might turn around and buy the other as well.
Edit: I tried the Stellar Blade Demo. It was kinda short compared to the more long form demos I’ve seen lately (games like MetaphorRefantizio have absolutely massive demos), but performance is pretty great. It’s clearly been well optimized, at the default settings it’s only pulling 16w or so in the starting area, so it looks like there’s a lot of room to play around with higher settings. The devs even have the default control scheme use the Deck’s back buttons. They clearly put a lot of actual attention and work into optimization and the deck experience, which is fantastic to see from a non-indie developer.
I’m still playing Clair Obscura Expedition 33 as my main game. I’m really enjoying it, I could take or leave the party/dodge mechanics, but the amount of build customization between weapon effects, skills, and equipable passives is incredible. A bunch of my friends have also bought the game, and we keep sharing builds we’ve found that feel super strong.
I recommend this performance mod, lets me play with a bit higher settings and raised my fps by 10 fps in some areas. It has a lot of different presets, I’ve been using default lighting ultra performance (and they using XeSS or FSR in game for upscaling)
To install the mod’a performance settings, copy the settings folder content to:
/home/deck/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/1903340/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local/Sandfall/Saved/Config/Windows/
To unlock all graphics settings in the game, you need the launch option SteamDeck=0 %command% , or alternatively installing fsr via the DeckyFramegen mod will also seemingly unlock all the other graphical settings as well.
Valve just open sourced SteamOS manager, which among other things allows updating the BIOS. I suspect we’ll see this get added into Bazzite and other Linux distros meant for the Deck, but I don’t think it’s been added yet.
In the meantime, the Arch Wiki claims that fwupd works fine for updating the Steam Deck bios on Arch, and I’m assuming that means it would work for Bazzite and other distros as well.
Here’s the instruction page on how to install it on your deck.
Windows uses a lot of power just existing, so you can’t get any of the windows handhelds down to a low power consumption. I remember when the Rig Ally first came out, the verge tested it using 5-8w of power on the steam deck, and using 16-22w of power on the Ally. Some of that is the hardware (the Deck has a really power efficient chip for low power games), but a lot of it is windows.
Yeah you’re right, I had mostly been looking at the difference between the steam deck and legion Go S on that chart and barely even noticed the difference between windows on the legion Go S there.
Unfortunately common issue with a lot of Epic store games, many don’t work or have issues when compared to the steam version. The protonDB reports are all 6months+ in age as well, so it’s possible something has changed with the game in that time. Found this discussion on reddit, where it sounds like it runs for most people but with terrible performance.
I know some Epic games take a really long time at first load. The Epic version of gloomhaven could take 1-2 hours to load the first time if I recall right, but after that first really long load time it would work fine. I’m assuming it’s compiling shaders or something the first time.