rotopenguin
@rotopenguin@infosec.pub
aka @rotopenguin@mastodon.social
- Comment on [Help] Swapped nvme from old deck into new deck, now headphones don't work 5 days ago:
Huh. Mmmaybe the LCD model has board revisions that are still different enough to trip things up? It’s definitely a bug to have wireplumber not “do the right thing no matter what hardware it booted up on today”, it would probably take a Valve engineer to chase that down and submit a patch.
- Comment on [Help] Swapped nvme from old deck into new deck, now headphones don't work 5 days ago:
👆 this sounds like the most probable fix. OP buried a very critical factoid - they moved the drive between OLED and LCD models. The systems have some significant hardware differences (as evidenced by the Windows drivers changing so much that Valve took a long time to update em). Somewhere, Pipewire has squirreled away details about routing or preferred devices from the old system.
Heck, there might be journalct log entries being generated you plug into the headphone jack. Pipewire could already be trying to tell you exactly what’s wrong.
- Comment on [Discussion] What are you playing on your Deck? - August 2025 1 week ago:
Fields of Mistria.
Just finished up “Last Time I Saw You”, ehh I think it’s the weak one in the “Until Then & Space For The Unbound” untrilogy.
- Comment on [QUICK QUESTION] Steam Deck Mirroring on my Android Tab with cable 4 weeks ago:
The HDMI port on any dock is output only. You would have to get an HDMI capture adapter to go that route, and watching those live with low lag is problematic. Beware of capture adapters that are USB 2.0 (a lot of cheapos will lie about this).
Another way to go would be Steam Link over wired ethernet.
One last way, which involves only one higher-end USB-C cable, would be to directly plug the deck to the tablet. One (or both) would act in a CDC-ether role to network the two together. (How do you simultaneously access the internet/Steam’s servers?). This setup is very fussy on the software side. I have been remarkably unsuccessful at connecting the deck to a laptop in this fashion, but Android is more open to doing “dual role” usb stuff.
- Comment on Anyone else get this? 5 weeks ago:
Steam should be loading a separate controller config for every game, or at very least loading a default profile of “every button is literally the same as an Xbox controller”. A weird SteamInput config shouldn’t affect across all games, I think.
Does it act up in Desktop mode? How about if Steam is closed, and you play something from Heroic?
It’s possible that a hardware fault is sending insane inputs. Bad connections to the controller-sub-boards? The controller microchip just going batty?
- Comment on Does the charge limit actually work? 5 weeks ago:
It’s doing the right thing - most of the harm has been done with the battery being charged up in the first place. If you can pull power from the wall instead of battery, do it. Ordinary usage will chip the battery down to the charge limit in due time.
I have an ASUS laptop which does not do this. When you turn on the battery limit, it stops pulling power from the wall until the battery is down to the right place. Very rude.
- Comment on 8BitDo announces it's controllers now have Steam/SteamOS compatibility 5 weeks ago:
It sounds like they have to wait for support to move from the Steam Client Beta to mainline. That happens on Valve Time, so they genuinely do not know.
- Comment on SteamOS 3.7.13 update gets fixes for more handhelds, fixes WiFi regression on Steam Deck OLED 5 weeks ago:
SteamOS isn’t really meant for any system outside the Steam Deck and a handful of similar handhelds. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have any Nvidia drivers, for starters.
Bazzite and Nobara are the general answers to gaming on any random PC hardware.
- Comment on SteamOS 3.7.13 update gets fixes for more handhelds, fixes WiFi regression on Steam Deck OLED 5 weeks ago:
Finally!
- Comment on [Discussion] Steam Summer Sale has started, what are you buying to play on your Deck? 1 month ago:
Terminal/Esc looks interesting
- Comment on Reservation Servers are busy... 1 month ago:
Opening something that’s a (mostly) static page works. Doing anything that involves talking to a database, such as aggregating your wishlist or searching for a game, is hopeless.
- Comment on Reservation Servers are busy... 1 month ago:
Try searching for any game, any game at all. Steam can’t do it.
- Comment on Is the Steam Deck getting outdated soon? Should I wait for the next gen? 1 month ago:
The thing that I would keep an eye out for is if Valve ever does a refresh with a VRR panel. With VRR, you don’t need to have “so much excess GPU power that it’s impossible to miss a rendering deadline”.
- Comment on Steam Deck / Gaming News #21 1 month ago:
Epic hasn’t gone out of their way to make life hard for Legendary/Heroic, yet. I guess that is a kind of support.
My biggest regret with Epic is buying Eastward there, and then whoops the DLC sidestory is available on every store but there. I can only read that as meaning “nobody makes money selling games, to the end user, on EGS. The only money you’ll make is from selling to Tim Epic for giveaway or an exclusive.”
Am I going to put any more money in Epic? No. Am I going to take the freebies? Sure.
- Comment on Steam Deck / Gaming News #21 1 month ago:
Before you do that, try replacing the EOSSDK-Win64-Shipping.dll file with an emulator kinda like Goldberg.
Fun fact - Nemirtingas made exactly such a thing, but it’s really hard to find a copy! I ended up finding it in “Nucleus Co-op”. Get the zip, don’t bother installing it, just yoink it out of the utils folder.
I can personally attest that “it hasn’t cryptolockered me as of this moment”, for what that’s worth.
- Comment on [Discussion] What have you been playing in Steam Next Fest? 1 month 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? 1 month 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 1 month 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? 1 month 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 2 months 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 2 months 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 months 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 months 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 months 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 2 months 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 2 months 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 2 months 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 2 months 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? 2 months 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 3 months 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.