rotopenguin
@rotopenguin@infosec.pub
aka @rotopenguin@mastodon.social
- Comment on [Discussion] What have you been playing in Steam Next Fest? 21 hours ago:
Yeah, Kaizen had a really poor showing for a demo. Making a good demo - something that shows off just the right bits of your game while teasing about more - there’s an art to that.
I figure that Zach is just really bad at designing demos and the game will be fine.
- Comment on [Discussion] What have you been playing in Steam Next Fest? 21 hours ago:
Öoo, Hirogami, Under the Island, Primal Planet, Escape Simulator 2. I like my puzzles, metroidvanias, and zeldas.
Particle Hearts was one that I didn’t click with, but still worth checking out just for its visual style.
- Comment on Microsoft dives into the handheld gaming PC wars with the Asus ROG Xbox Ally 6 days ago:
I’m pretty sure that this “streamlined, gaming-first” development team will last right up to the moment they come into conflict with any other corporate goal.
You’re not doing AI-first? You’re not injecting Bing into every experience? Where are all the ads? Oops, so sorry, your role has been made redundant.
- Comment on Discussion: Do you think the next steamdeck will be x86 or ARM? 6 days ago:
Standby time is 99% a function of “how much power the ram takes”. If you have less ram, it takes less power to refresh.
- Comment on Microsoft dives into the handheld gaming PC wars with the Asus ROG Xbox Ally 1 week ago:
Trackpads cost “money”, and besides you already have a touchscreen.
The thing that really makes me jealous is the Freesync panel. The secret to getting a battery-powered GPU to keep up with the screen is to stop making it keep up with the screen.
- Comment on Ogu and the Secret Forest via Epic Games - keeps freezing 1 week ago:
When Heroic adds a game to Steam, it’s actually telling Steam to run heroic with a game://gameid argument. So, any such game is already running under the “heroic environment”. Running the Steam entry for the game shouldn’t be much different from running Heroic and then the game.
I think the thing you really needed was to just give the game one good run in Desktop mode. A lot of times, they use their first (successful) run to install various runtimes, and those installers need to make pop up windows (which Game Mode is not very good at). Running Heroic in Desktop mode to install the game, and doing your first run in Desktop mode is usually enough, and you can run the game just fine in Game mode after that.
- Comment on [Discussion] What Games are you playing on your Deck? - June 2025 2 weeks ago:
Actually, I don’t think anything works at Nexusmods. What a shite site.
- Comment on [Discussion] What Games are you playing on your Deck? - June 2025 2 weeks ago:
The link doesn’t work, but I might be using the same mod as seen in Steam Community? I has no idea about it having presets, thought it was one-and-done.
- Comment on SteamOS 3.7.9 Beta: Wingercizing 2 weeks ago:
Why doesn’t anybody bother with tailoring a Windows distro like this?
- Comment on With the Legion Go S, we can now directly compare performance between official builds of SteamOS and Windows 3 weeks ago:
It’s worse than that. MS could quickly turn the boat around. They have the cash. They have the manpower (well, have recently fired). The only thing they don’t have is THE ABILITY TO THINK ABOUT ANYTHING BUT AI AI AI AI GOTTA HAVE AI AIIIIIIII. The brainrot has eaten Nadella, and eaten the whole board.
- Comment on Valve's huge Steam Deck update is now ready for everyone, including rival AMD handhelds 3 weeks ago:
Lol. I was kinda hoping that $80, and “made by the same vendor”, and “made by a reputable company” would get me a dock that works better than a $20 SIXLTR off of Amazon.
- Comment on With the Legion Go S, we can now directly compare performance between official builds of SteamOS and Windows 3 weeks ago:
I think you’re a bit better off with SteamOS’s gamescope rather than going through gnome-shell.
- Comment on Valve's huge Steam Deck update is now ready for everyone, including rival AMD handhelds 3 weeks ago:
The Deck update is great so far, but the Dock update is not. I couldn’t get any video on DP until I rolled the dock firmware back.
- Comment on Is upgrading the ssd easy enough that it is worth the cost savings? 5 weeks ago:
Little pro-tip - I got a Corsair drive and tried putting it in external enclosure to copy to it, that didn’t work.
These small Nvme drives are dram-less, so they borrow some memory from the host system. All of these drives have a fallback mode when they can’t borrow host memory, which is slower. Apparently, the fallback mode is so well programmed that drive can crash during large write sessions.
It worked just fine once I put the new drive inside the Deck, and pulled data from the old drive sitting in the enclosure instead.
- Comment on A few questions before getting a used Steam Deck after my wedding 1 month ago:
“Gnome Power Statistics”, which you can install from Discover Store in Desktop mode, will tell you the battery’s health.
If it’s an earlier build of Steam Deck, the battery is probably glued in like hell. I think Valve eased up on that later on.
- Comment on [Discussion] What are you playing on your Deck? - May 2025 1 month ago:
The default graphics on Deck are unbelievably ugly, doing the StreamDeck=0 thing is mandatory. I was never great with reaction games, so the slight framerate loss means I go from “missing counters 98% of the time” to “missing counters 98.2% of the time”. I’ll take that.
- Comment on Recommendations for games for 6 year old 2 months ago:
Haven’t tried these out on a calibrated six year old, but some that I liked which might be in the ballpark are Tinykin, a Short Hike, Smurfs Vileleaf, Loddlenaut, Lil Gator Game, Little Kitty Big City, Costume Quest, What the Golf/Car.
- Comment on Recommendations for games for 6 year old 2 months ago:
Luanti is all the minecraft a kid needs these days
- Comment on Show off your Steam Deck's home screen! 2 months ago:
I think the xray is from ifixit? I nudged trimming it until the port and volume down button lined up just so.
- Comment on Low battery notification requrst 2 months ago:
I don’t think that systemd has a whole lot of sleep-management architecture that does what you want? What it does have is the ability to do “suspend-then-hibernate”, which would suspend for some set time, wake up, and flip over to hibernating. I’ve set that up on Debian (not too hard), Ubuntu (pure hell), haven’t tried on SteamOS.
What you want is technically possible without changing the hardware or firmware, but I think it would take an unreasonable amount of systemd coding.
- Comment on What are some light-hearted, feel-good, comforting games to play on the deck? 2 months ago:
I don’t think that dxvk is a thing that you’re supposed to pull in on its own. Any recent version of Proton (and especially ProtonGE) brings its own up-to-date copy of it.
- Comment on What are some light-hearted, feel-good, comforting games to play on the deck? 3 months ago:
Or, you might want to go to the studio’s original title, Sunshine Heavy Industries. It’s pretty much just building spaceships out of legos.
- Comment on Half-Life 3 is just the hot exclusive Valve needs to propel SteamOS past Windows 3 months ago:
It’s more than enough to make HL3 a Steam exclusive. And make it run well on the Deck. If Valve really wants to gild the lily, they could put a little side-story just for the Deck’s controls. A follow-up to Aperture Desk Job, perhaps.
- Comment on Steam Deck News 3 months ago:
If y’all want your own copy of Tunic, it is available in a new itch.io charity bundle.
- Comment on Best Way to Clone Micro SD Card Linux? 3 months ago:
What’s wrong with “cp -r”?
- Comment on FreeTube full screen 3 months ago:
Try messing with ~/.var/app io.treetubeapp.FreeTube/config/FreeTube/settings.db , in the “bounds” line.
It doesn’t look like Freetube had a --fullscreen option, so you can’t tell steam to just do that.
- Comment on My SO got a steamdeck today, and it's a lot better than I imagined it to be 4 months ago:
Steam’s “immutable” system isn’t that bad. It will revert a lot of stuff during OS updates, but Stable doesn’t go through that very often. I put all of my changes into a shell script and reapply it when that happens.
- Comment on My SO got a steamdeck today, and it's a lot better than I imagined it to be 4 months ago:
Add anything with sonic in the name. Like SRB2:Persona.
- Comment on Micro SD card suggestions 4 months ago:
The best place to buy Samsung cards is from Samsung’s site, the best place to buy Sandisk cards is from … Western Digital. Sometimes they even have sales that approximate Amazon.
It’s pretty safe to assume that you will get a real card from the horse’s mouth.
- Comment on Valve is looking to add an optional battery charge limit to the SD, to preserve battery life 4 months ago:
Apple’s solution is to integrate a heating strip with the glue. Put some power into it, and the glue warms up and releases.
