MentalEdge
@MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
Eskating cyclist, gamer and enjoyer of anime. Probably an artist. Also I code sometimes, pretty much just to mod titanfall 2 tho.
Introverted, yet I enjoy discussion to a fault.
- Comment on phonk.mp3 5 days ago:
I made one with sound.
- Comment on Steam Controller 5 days ago:
Magnetic hall-effect thumb sticks
SEE NINTENDO?! IT’S NOT THAT HARD!!
- Comment on E Ink goes mobile with budget eye-friendly smartphone 2 weeks ago:
With the Likebook Mars I got used to charging it often. I was exepecting the same with the Boox, but it has suprised me in a good way.
It came configured to power off within a couple hours when unused. Which is one solution. If you only read every few days, setting it to turn off when unused does ensure it will have juice to spare the next time you pick it up, though you’ll have wait about a minute to actually be reading again…
To avoid booting it all the time, I currently have it set to power off after 2 days of inactivity. Which is essentially never, unless I take a weeklong pause in reading.
This has meant I’m plugging it in once a week or so. Still more often than the month my Kobo used to last, but not bad at all. I can still empty it in one day if spend all day reading with the frontlight on, but that’s true for any reader.
If I queue up a bunch of manga downloads, it can drain from fully charged to empty in about 2 hours.
When it does go unused, power off within two days means it only wastes about 10% of the battery sleeping before powering off entirely. (That translates to about 5% per day when sleeping, that’s with network off during sleep and all apps suspended). Meaning I’ve not had to charge it when I go to use it after a longer break.
I don’t use koreader myself, but it’s on f-droid and hence extremely easy to install on the Boox.
- Comment on Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark 2 weeks ago:
Me getting a deck was the catalyst for me, and later three other people I know switching on our main rigs. They saw it worked for me, and that was all they needed.
Also the deck is kind of evergreen. The games that run on it aren’t going to stop running on it. The same way people still play games on GBA or PSP, I don’t see it becoming “obselete” the way laptops or phones do.
- Comment on E Ink goes mobile with budget eye-friendly smartphone 2 weeks ago:
Currently on a Boox Go Color 7. My previous reader was a Likebook Mars, not color. Both are android based, meaning I can install Tachiyomi for manga. I now use syncyomi with TachiSY, allowing me to sync my Tachiyomi collection between my phone and ereader, so I can manage my library and read the occasional chapter on my phone, while syncing all that to my ereader so I never need to manually do any library management on it.
The Go 7 is just a tad to small for western comics, but its usable. It’s in the sweet spot for manga. I really like it. I technically prefer the size of the Mars, but the smaller footprint on the Go 7 has meant I’ve actually brought it with me a lot more, and the physical page buttons are simply superior.
The two ways to do color that currently exist, are Triton/Kaleido and Spectra.
Triton and the newer Kaleido, consist of a normal black and white panel overlayed by a color filter that divides it into RGB sub-pixels. For example, to do red, the bw screen goes white under the red sub-pixels, and black below the rest. This produces red, though to maintain the brightness of full white the filter isn’t very strong, so it’s a fairly pale result. The filter means it can’t go as white as a pure bw screen, but in my experience the difference is tiny. You can just barely see the difference, even side-by-side. And even tho the colors are pale, seeing book covers and comics with even a little bit of color is really nice.
The other way is having actual colored ink, or multi-color cells, and some other ways. What these all have in common is that the refresh rate is truly glacial. Like ten seconds for a single page turn slow. You’ll find these in digital picture frames and such, no ereaders have been made using these methods.
I would not consider a Kindle unless you can be sure you can jailbreak it. I had a Kobo at one point, and while I really liked it, having gotten used to Tachiyomi I could not go back to manually converting manga into .CBZ files and syncing them to my reader.
The ability to install android apps enables so many options for finding things to read, and ways to read them.
- Comment on E Ink goes mobile with budget eye-friendly smartphone 2 weeks ago:
They’ve made several e-ink phones by now.
It’s just not suited for it. Even though it CAN do fairly smooth animation, it always looks like absolute ass due to the ghosting.
The tech is doing fine tho. There are two decent ways to do color now (one fast, one slow), and the picture quality is mind-boggling when you let it refresh properly. It’s absolutely fantastic for reading books, but it’s only gotten better for my favorite use-case, which is comics and manga. The ability to do color adds so much.
It’s also in use in a ton of industries. There are re-usable eink price-tags for store shelves that you can put price and product info on. While just sitting there showing info, they use no power, while still being able to be updated digitally when needed.
I also realized the live timetable at my local bus-stop is actually a giant eink panel. Which makes so much sense. Compared to a giant LCD panel it uses orders of magnitude less power, and is even more readable in daylight without any kind of backlight, and it only needs to update once a minute. It doesn’t show any info with more than 60 second precision anyway.
But eink simply cannot compete with LCD/OLED in terms of emissive color quality and refresh rate. While it straight up wins in terms of daylight readability, longevity and power efficiency. Supposedly the panels lose contrast over time, but I’ve never noticed it happening myself, even on decades old devices.
For normal use tho, eink sucks. I avoid ever using my ereader for anything except actually reading. Writing, doing any kind of browsing, (even to find something to read), is horrible. It’s like using a phone with gloves on, but all the time.
The experience is at its best when you just continue reading something you already had open, and only ever interact with the display or a button to turn the page. The moment you need to pan, zoom, select something, use and on-screen keyboard, etc. you start wishing you could use something else.
I literally use my phone to find what to read, then switch to the ereader to actually read.
- Comment on GOG asking for more donations from gamers with the new GOG Patrons program 3 weeks ago:
It’d be enough even if they just contributed to Heroic, the way Valve started contributing to wine/proton.
It’s mind boggling to me that they remained completely silent on linux, even as SteamDeck took off.
- Comment on Heroic games have stopped launching, any ideas? 1 month ago:
You should be able to try to launch the games in a readable terminal from heroic, from game properties or something.
That should allow you to see any errors.
- Comment on DuckStation dev dropping support for Linux 3 months ago:
I think I’ve been using pcsxr for too long to care.
Is there anything that makes duckstation worth using over the other psx emulators?
- Comment on [Help] Buying Steam Deck locally vs internationally 3 months ago:
The difference, like the other commenter already pointed out, is whether you take something across a border, and then leave it there.
If you take the stuff you brought with you, back when you leave, then you didn’t import it. Import tax is exactly that, a tax on stuff moving from one country, to another.
Personal items aren’t subject to this, because the owner is coming and leaving with them. Technically there’s a whole song and dance that should happen when you come and go, but that’s massively inefficient, so customs will just sit there and trust that if you have something to declare, you will.
- Comment on [Help] Buying Steam Deck locally vs internationally 3 months ago:
That’s false mutual exclusivity. What other thing could you not also do, without buying an extra one?
- Comment on [Help] Buying Steam Deck locally vs internationally 3 months ago:
I’m having trouple parsing this comment into a sentence that makes sense. You don’t penny pinch e-waste? What?
Either way, a lot of people won’t think about this in terms of mere monetary value. Every bit of plastic counts.
And that’s before considering that not everyone can afford to make trivial purchases. And even if you can afford it, I can’t imagine making purchases without thinking about it beyond whether I have the money. That some people don’t think past that, contributes to tons of problems.
I could easily afford a more convenient and smaller GaN charger to replace the one I got with my Deck, but it wouldn’t really bring me any new value. Every cent I’d spend on that purchase would be more efficient when used for something else.
If not for my needs, then someone elses.
People care. And they should. You bother me, because behind your comments, is the suggesting that we shouldn’t. To you, one less piece of waste is “not worth it”. That’s wrong.
- Comment on [Help] Buying Steam Deck locally vs internationally 3 months ago:
So you’re saying buy the US one, throw the charger that comes with it in the trash, then buy another?
- Comment on [Help] Buying Steam Deck locally vs internationally 3 months ago:
I would try to somehow order it in france.
Having the EU plug on the actual charger is just nicer, but more importantly, the warranty is longer.
The power adapter accepts 100-240V, and the same one is used worldwide. They just put different plugs on it (you can see the seams if you look close).
- Comment on [help] Steam remote play between manjaro host and steam deck client 3 months ago:
Great!
If you want Sunshine to run and stream the game at the deck’s resolution, you’ll need to add a “Command Preparation” entry to set and unset the resolution and framerate requested by the Moonlight client on the deck.
Mine look like this:
sh -c “kscreen-doctor output.DP-1.hdr.disable; steam steam://open/bigpicture; kscreen-doctor output.DP-1.mode.${SUNSHINE_CLIENT_WIDTH}x${SUNSHINE_CLIENT_HEIGHT}@${SUNSHINE_CLIENT_FPS}”sh -c “kscreen-doctor output.DP-1.hdr.enable; kscreen-doctor output.DP-1.mode.3440x1440@165; sleep 3; steam steam://close/bigpicture”The first one disables HDR (colors are wrong on the deck otherwise), launches big picture, and sets the main monitor to whatever resolution and framerate is on the client end.
The second re-enables HDR, sets the monitor back to it’s native resolution and framerate, then waits 3 second for the resolution change to finish, and then exits big picture. (The wait is so that the normal steam window doesn’t get placed weird while resolution is different)
You can modify these commands and test them in a terminal before setting them up in Sunshine. You can remove the HDR toggle since you’re on x11, and you’ll want to check what the ID of your main monitor is, for me it’s “DP-1”.
- Comment on [help] Steam remote play between manjaro host and steam deck client 3 months ago:
Just tried it on my arch system, works. Not sure what’s wrong for you. Nothing sticks out in what you posted.
But like the other guy said, you should use Moonlight/Sunshine.
Better latency, better picture quality.
Plus unlike steam, you can set it to run things as the decks screen resolution. I get giant black border’s because my desktop is an ultrawide, but even on 16:9 you’ll get small ones, since the deck is 16:10.
I can tell you more about setting up Moonlight/Sunshine if you want. I have it configured so I can remote into my PC in big picture mode, and then I just use my deck to play whatever.
- Comment on There is now a Decky Plugin to use Lossless frame gen on Steam Deck 4 months ago:
I don’t know about anyone else, but the reason I say stuff like “fake frames, real flames” about nvidia, is that they include framegen in their performance stats.
As if it’s a tech that boosts actual performance. They use it to lie.
When they say “this card is twice as powerful as last gen” what they really mean is, it is exactly the same, but we turned on 2x framegen. Nevermind that there’s no reason you couldn’t do the same on the last gen card.
- Comment on What is your favorite Steam deck Bluetooth keyboard? 4 months ago:
If it says bluetooth, then it can do bluetooth even if it comes with a dongle.
A lot of keyboards support bluetooth, but also come with a dongle in order to have the option for a dedicated wireless connection.
Bluetooth is convenient, but if you care about latnecy, it’s horrid. Bluetooth mice and keyboards are noticably worse for performance gaming due to the additional delay in button presses and movements.
Hebce some of us prefer to use the dongle, as they allow for a significantly higher polling rate. Doesn’t mean the keyboard won’t work just fine on bluetooth.
- Comment on Desktop mode broken? 4 months ago:
Sounds like make the plasma config got screwed, and now the default panel (the taskbar) is off-screen somewhere.
Let me get back you with more details about what you can do.
- Comment on How long before Switch 2 JoyCon MouseMode is usable on a Deck? 5 months ago:
Couldn’t you just use any mouse? It’s not like the deck is limited to only controllers.
Or is the idea that you want the left controller for movement, rather than using the left controls on the deck or a full controller?
That said, I’m sceptical that the joycon mouse experience is any good on surfaces other than a table. Or even then, considering the ergonomics of the thing when used as a mouse.
Even if the sensor in it is a good one, it’s going to be bluetooth, and bluetooth mice have always had painfully noticeable latency in my experience.
- Comment on SteamOS Manager for BIOS updates, TDP and GPU clock controls now open source, mentions "Download Mode" 5 months ago:
Download mode is definitely not a thing yet.
One of the things that’s a botver with the deck is having to leave it on and probably on the charger, if you want to install a couple hubdred gigs of games.
- Comment on Installed New SSD, Stuck Like This While Reimagining 5 months ago:
Yes, it should be safe to force a shutdown, and then re-doing the re-image.
- Comment on Valve announce SteamOS Compatibility ratings, an extension of Steam Deck Verified for more devices 5 months ago:
Again. I know.
That’s why I’m hoping steam would make their own thing that’ll just always be there for linux users.
- Comment on Valve announce SteamOS Compatibility ratings, an extension of Steam Deck Verified for more devices 6 months ago:
In desktop mode, on the desktop client, outside big picture mode?
- Comment on Valve announce SteamOS Compatibility ratings, an extension of Steam Deck Verified for more devices 6 months ago:
I want this on my desktop, in not big picture mode. I already know it can be done on the deck.
- Comment on Valve announce SteamOS Compatibility ratings, an extension of Steam Deck Verified for more devices 6 months ago:
I wish I could have protondb badges inside the desktop steam client.
Would be nice if this worked with linux in general.
- Comment on Steam Deck sales still going strong over three years later 6 months ago:
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
The device isn’t going to cease to exist, just because it was only for sale for two months.
- Comment on Steam Deck sales still going strong over three years later 6 months ago:
Yes, exactly. Getting it repaired (both within and outside of warranty) and spare parts availability.
What do you mean, “exactly”? The vast majority of owners will not need to repair theirs, and the vast majority of units will outlive their owners interest in using them. You’re assuming you’ll be one of the exceptions, which is always a possibility, but you can’t factor in it in as if it’s a 100% chance.
Software eventually too, but usually that takes a while longer.
What do you mean? It’s an x86 PC. The same way I can grab a 15-year-old laptop and slap a linux distro on it, the same thing is possible with the Deck.
Would you have bought a Steam Deck if Valve would stop producing them after 3 years? I wouldn’t.
I would and I did. In fact every person who has bought one before today, technically did. That’s a million points of contest against the argument you’re trying to make with this. Are you seeing the catch 22 you’re asking your tech to adhere to?
I’d have bought a Deck even if it only lasted a few months, because I got one two months after launch on pre-reservation.
And why not? It’s a great device that is worth the price of admission, as-is. I do not need valve to make several million more, and to keep doing so for several years, for my unit to become been worth owning. It is worth that all on its own.
I get wanting companies to do hardware better, but the level of the standard you are claiming you want here, is absurd. The Decks potential for longevity is above and beyond almost any other hardware product in the tech industry right now, with the exception of the framework laptops.
My one unit has given me three years and hundreds of hours of gaming away from home, and will likely give several hundred more before it stops working. When it does, there are a variety of possibilities to get it back to working.
If it had stopped working within warranty, I’d either have gotten a new unit, or my money back. There is no gamble there.
- Comment on Steam Deck sales still going strong over three years later 6 months ago:
Again, what do you mean “continued”?
The only impact the discontinuation of those devices had on the people who bought them, is that they can’t buy another. Aside from that, they still work. You’re talking as if the “end” of sale is a point in time where owning the products somehow stops being worth it, or like the device ceases to exist on that day. But I know you know otherwise.
If the Deck stops being sold tomorrow, that has zero impact on the one I already have, save for the possible decline in spare parts available.
There are lots of reasons to wait to buy something, but “they might stop selling them” seems more like a reason to get something you want to have sooner, rather than later. So that when sales stop, you have one you can keep.
- Comment on Steam Deck sales still going strong over three years later 6 months ago:
Fair enough. But that only further confuses me on how you came to the conclusion you did.
Surely it’s enough for a given product to be worth the price one pays at the time of purchase, and for that product to not lose that value with age. Judge a product for what it is, not what it will be.
We almost certainly are getting a second controller, but that will in no way take away, nor improve, the value that people who bought and still use the first one got and get out of it.