NeatNit

@NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Steam Deck Was Turned Into a Game Boy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I know that it’s just a nickname people gave it, like “Wiimote” for the Wii Remote which caused trouble for the Weemote but was obviously not Nintendo’s responsibility. But as I said, it’s a kinda-funny meme description of what the Steam Machine is, I get annoyed when people actually use it as a nickname for it in conversation or videos.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Steam Deck Was Turned Into a Game Boy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly I’m so sick of it being called the “GabeCube”, partly because it’s too close to GameCube phonetically that it actually sounds pretty much identical to GameCube in most cases, but moreso because it’s the result of the hard work of so many talented and passionate engineers at Valve, it feels really disrespectful to call it after the businessman who funded it.

  It’s an amusing pun, I enjoyed hearing/reading it the first time. Second time onwards it’s just annoying.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨dBrand Announces 9 Steam Machine Skins That Are Now Available⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m convinced that Valve must have been waiting for contact from dbrand. Valve probably already decided what their terms would be, but needed dbrand to contact them and not the other way around. Since dbrand failed to do that, they had no choice but to send a C&D.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG confirm they are working towards GOG Galaxy on Linux⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What I’m hoping is that they start supporting cloud saves for Linux native games, e.g. Silksong. This is something GOG needs to support server-side, and they’d only bother to do that if they have an official Linux client to do the syncing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Machine updates: Reservations, waitlists, and more⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m assuming/hoping you configured the LED strip to be all red :D

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Machine LED support on Linux has been merged into OpenRGB⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Just curious (I don’t have a Steam Machine and don’t plan to get one), doesn’t Steam fight for control of the LEDs if you run both Steam and OpenRGB at the same time?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Machine LED support on Linux has been merged into OpenRGB⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup, OpenRGB has audio visualization support in the Effects plugin: openrgb.org/plugin_effects.html

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨leds-valve-dkms - Steam Machine LED driver for other distros⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh yeah, OpenRGB is awesome— oh, it’s you :P

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Steam Machine calls itself steamdeck in my network⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  One might say the Deck still isn’t fully baked. I got mine a few months ago, so well after it launched, and there were still some rough edges. For example, I wasn’t able to redeem the OLED goodies (startup animation and keyboard theme). Steam Support advised me to switch to the SteamOS beta at the time, which worked. So the release version of SteamOS had a known redemption bug for months, likely to affect a large number of new users? Sure it’s a small thing, but exactly what I mean by not fully baked.

  I have some other nitpicks with it but overall I’ll admit it works quite well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve says iFixit will keep selling Steam Deck batteries after all. Valve won’t be sunsetting the battery yet.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  From my understanding, the first and second parties are the seller (Valve) and the buyer (you). They are the two who have a contract between them. A third party, then, is any party which isn’t signed on the contract. That is, an outsider to the contract.

  Any other meaning of second party is probably a back-formation from a misunderstanding of the terms 1st and 3rd party.

  Disclaimer: I literally have no idea what I’m talking about

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The company may be big, but their hardware orders are nothing compared to the orders for compute farms. They’ve gone on record recently about the Steam Machine saying there are some components they could not secure at all, for any price. Their service contacts are just not attractive when the world-ending AI farms are happy to pay more per unit and ordering more units total.

  I do think they really should try their hardest to keep those replacement parts coming, but from the outside it’s impossible to know how hard they actually tried. The only question is whether you give them the benefit of the doubt. You don’t seem to, and that’s fine (honestly I’m not sure I should give it either), but what I’m saying is there is doubt, the market is so fucked right now that this is actually believable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What solution, if any, do you use for gaming in bed?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d be shocked if not. There’s just no reason whatsoever for it to not work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What solution, if any, do you use for gaming in bed?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Awake while you play? Weird! :P

  Kidding aside, if you can find or improvise any way for the Deck to stay where you want it to be without having to hold it with your hands (for example, place it on your lap), I still recommend the joy-cons. The arm freedom is amazing.

  Other split controllers are available, for example certain VR controllers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What solution, if any, do you use for gaming in bed?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To the user who downvoted me and hasn’t posted on Lemmy in more than a year… Idk what to say actually, it’s weird that you’d do that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What solution, if any, do you use for gaming in bed?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t tried it on the Deck yet, but expect it to work:

  Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons. Lean the Deck (or Switch) on its side on something, such that with your head on the pillow you can look at it. With one joy-con in each hand, you can reposition your arms however you want and independently of each other.

  This method with Ace Attorney games on the Switch is my sleeping pill. Works amazingly well for me. After I finish my current Ace Attorney game, I plan to finally try it with the Steam Deck and a different visual novel.

  Foreseeable caveat: charging the joy-cons will be annoying. If you put them in a Switch to charge (which is my only charging solution right now), they get paired to it automatically and will need to be re-paired with the Deck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Deck: Does anyone have an idea or way of estimating how many Steam Deck are in use? (Speculation)⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In the Steam hardware survey, under Video Card Description, you can find: Steam Deck GPU - 0.45%.

  Random sources online for which I cannot find a source (though I didn’t really look much) say Steam has 132 million monthly active users.

  If we take both of those figures at face value, assume being a monthly active user on Steam is a good proxy for “in use”, then that makes 594,000 Steam Decks in active use.

  This is far less than the sales figure that @breadsmasher@lemmy.world cited, which could be a combination of a lot of factors:

  1. Steam Decks which have been sold but are not in active use for whatever reason.
  2. The monthly active users figure for Steam seems low to me for a platform as big as Steam. It could be wrong.
  3. It is possible that Steam Deck users are under-represented in the Steam Hardware Survey, and they make up a bigger percentage of Steam users. Maybe they are less likely to participate in it?
  4. People might be using Steam Deck for other purposes besides Steam, so they are not active Steam users. Personally I doubt this is a significant factor.
  5. Some users might participate in the hardware survey more than once, causing the calculation to be wrong. I’m not sure how the hardware survey works, but this could be a huge factor.
  6. Who know what else I didn’t think of.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SteamOS 3.8 is supported for *all* PCs with discrete AMD GPUs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What are those benefits?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SteamOS 3.8 is supported for *all* PCs with discrete AMD GPUs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll admit something slightly embarrassing.

  This has kinda sorta been the case for quite a while now, people have been installing Steam Deck versions of SteamOS on various AMD machines with various levels of success. It was also acknowledged by Valve, with an “at your own risk” policy.

  But idiot me thought “AMD platforms” means the CPU needs to be AMD. So just FYI to anyone in the same boat: no, Intel CPUs should work just fine. The only thing they meant is that the GPU has to be AMD. All the other components can kind of be whatever the heck you want. Including CPU, as long as it’s x86-64.

  But actually, I understand they now also support Intel GPUs. I think I’ve read that somewhere. So at this point it’s pretty clear that you can use anything expect nvidia.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Being Proud of the Thing We Made Did Not Give Us the Right to Make It' — Dbrand Cancels Its Steam Machine Companion Cube⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I am not the least bit surprised.

  When they first announced it so soon after the Steam Machine was announced, it couldn’t have been more obvious that it’s unlicensed. There’s just no way they could have secured a license from Valve that fast.

  After that though, you might think they had plenty of time to reach out and make a deal. And yes, I did half expect them to do this instead of being complete idiots, but judging by the sheer confidence they showed in the original announcement, being complete idiots is also likely.

  I am slightly annoyed at Valve for waiting up until the last possible minute to send that C&D, considering they HAD to know about this product right from the start. But I get it. Giving Valve the maximum benefit of the doubt, they could have decided to wait for dbrand to contact them, and they probably already worked up the terms by which they’d license their IP. But as a sort of power play combined with a test of character, they needed dbrand to be the one to make contact first. And they just waited for that to happen, because dbrand HAD to get a license from them, right? Alas, dbrand failed the test of character. Damn.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve Steam Machine Review - Gamers Nexus⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting. I haven’t found it, but I did just spot the pinned comment in under the Gamers Nexus video: “TEAR-DOWN coming up next!” So I guess I’ll just wait for that :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve Steam Machine Review - Gamers Nexus⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Has anyone made a Steam Machine teardown video? I wanna see how this thing is built. All I’ve seen is that there’s a bunch of hardware basically clipping through a giant heatsink. Has anyone disassembled it further than that in a video?

  I know the RAM is technically upgradeable, has any video shown how to access it?

  (I did watch the whole GN video but I wasn’t paying full attention so maybe they showed it and I missed it)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve Steam Machine Review - Gamers Nexus⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  They still might. After the buyers are selected in the raffle, they might have the chance to state a preference before the order is finalized.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SteamOS 3.8 is out⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Help out a Deck newbie:l. I’m on the beta channel, so:

  1. Is the new update just a copy of the last update to the beta channel?
  2. If not (e.g. there are some bug fixes or tweaks for the proper release), then do I get the update as part of the beta channel? Or should I switch to the stable channel?
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Any desktop-mode tips for a new Steam Deck owner?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I forgot to mention. Turns out PWAsForFirefox doesn’t work at all with the Flatpak version of Firefox github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox/issues/142 so the whole question is moot. The project’s dev seems to be actively involved in making that possible though. I guess I’ll live without nice web-apps on the steam deck for now, it’s not a deal breaker.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Any desktop-mode tips for a new Steam Deck owner?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  he suspend mode is fantastic and there’s little reason to ever do a full shutdown or reboot in my experience.

  Thank you, that’s quite useful to know!

  Slightly off-topic but you reminded me. Have you tried using Steam Deck as a “Steam Controller” for PC? I did look up an article on that once and at first glance it seemed to involve a bunch of caveats. Haven’t tried it properly yet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Any desktop-mode tips for a new Steam Deck owner?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Precisely! I like to describe it as: a portable external monitor, in the shape of a laptop, with a built-in keyboard and trackpad.

  Many Android phones support a desktop mode when connected to an external monitor. Most notably Samsung’s higher-end phones, and they call this feature Samsung DeX. Lapdocks are perfect to make use of this functionality.

  NexDock is a more reputable brand that makes high-quality lapdocks. Uperfect is another, but I get the feeling they don’t care as much about making good usable products, and instead just want to maximize their specs for marketability.

  ELECROW, I never heard of before and it looks like chinesium, but it’s the only lapdock I found that actually ships to me so that’s what I ordered. Should arrive in a couple of weeks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Any desktop-mode tips for a new Steam Deck owner?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I use it on Linux Mint, the biggest issue I have with it is external links:

  github.com/linuxmint/webapp-manager#how-to-open-l…

  How to open links in my main browser?

  For Firefox, all links are always opened within the WebApp, either directly or using a new tab. To open a link in your main browser, right-click anywhere, select Copy link location and paste the link in your main browser.

  Really annoying. PWAs For Firefox fixes it, you just gotta change a setting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Any desktop-mode tips for a new Steam Deck owner?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Very interesting, thank you for this tip!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Any desktop-mode tips for a new Steam Deck owner?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  When docked, the Deck works great as a desktop PC. But not as a laptop. It’s too much to carry (lapdock + deck). The lapdock would be more suitable for your phone.

  Thanks for the advice. I’m going to find out for myself either way though.

  I have a large backpack and I’m used to carrying a lot of weight. I often carry a laptop + Nintendo Switch + battery pack and a bunch of misc stuff. So size and weight will be fine.

  And part of the plan is that on days where I don’t need a full Linux OS, I would only take the lapdock and indeed use it with my phone. Thus my portable computing options are a lot more modular.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Any desktop-mode tips for a new Steam Deck owner?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for the advice! I did already figure out the thing about the trackpads. I found the whole environment to be surprisingly usable in handheld mode, but definitely not ideal.

  Thankfully that’s not how I’m planning to use it. I ordered a lapdock (specifically this one, which is the only one I’ve found that ships to my godforsaken country) and it should arrive in a couple of weeks and be the main way I use Desktop Mode. Then I don’t need Steam input.

  If you’re using a customizer like DeckyLoader holding off on updates for a week or so until there’s confirmation of stability and compatibility is advisable, but that’s more for handheld mode.

  Can you tell me more about DeckyLoader and why I might want to use it? Or just link to a page with that info. I never looked into it, and I’m wondering what’s actually missing from vanilla SteamOS.