Shazbot!

Not going to lie I kind of wish they had kept the Dead Space that the screen created. I feel like it’s not going to be as comfortable with everything just shoved in tight like that I actually really really like the spacing that the screen on the steam deck provides

It’s not even just the os, don’t get me wrong that’s a huge part of it but the control layouts and the quality of the buttons on all these other competitors to the steam deck are just garbage. Why the absolute fuck does no one want to do symmetrical joysticks, I will never use asymmetrical joysticks. Why does everything need to be offset and weird and why is the touchpad always an afterthought shoved into the smallest possible corner. I use the touchpads on the steam deck literally constantly, either for radial menus or even in games like factorio just as a mouse

Your not too dumb to learn linux. I know it seems scary, and a lot of the autistic people that like it will try to convince you it’s only for really smart people. But at the end of the day a lot of basic tasks are actually easier on linux. There are some that are harder gaming used to be very difficult for example. Although thanks to valve, and the steam deck for the most part if it’s a steam game you can just click play and it’s probably going to work.

But as an example of a more basic thing, let’s say you want to install an application.

Windows: go to Google, type app name, make sure it’s the real actual website officially for that app and not a sponsored result or some other fake website, find the download, pray it’s not buried in a bunch of fake download buttons, double click the exe, be careful to make sure it’s not installing any toolbars or other packaged bullshit, finally get your application.

Linux: there are some variations (apt dnf pacman) but all of them work the same, for arch it’s “pacman -Syu <name of app>” id argue thats WAY easier. If it’s not in the main repos chances are high it’s in the AUR (arch user repository) so you just yay -Syu <name of app>. It’s not harder (imo) just different.

I’ve actually had a number of pretty average computer user friends let me help them transition to Linux because of the crap Windows is doing lately. And after getting used to the differences they agree that Linux is not actually harder, it’s just different, they grew up with windows, they are used to how things are done on windows, so it seemed difficult just because it wasn’t the same. But once they got used to it they would actually agree that a lot of things are actually easier.

Now whether or not you want to put in that time to learn those differences, and change how you use your computer, is an entirely different question that you have to ask yourself. But you are not too stupid to learn Linux because realistically it’s not any more difficult than Windows is

If you use the default piped instance then it’s usually overloaded. You can either try finding an alternative or just host your own, personally I do the ladder I rented a VPS for 20 bucks a month and I host my own pipe there

There is libretube for using piped as an app on Android

The ratios are the same, you just can’t find videos of people doing it with small things because that’s not as interesting. There is still ultimately a limit to how much a given amount of heat sink can transfer heat to air even with a small processor.

20w TDP would be possible with some extra forced air from a dock. Mainly because some handhelds can be put to 20 tdp, and they technically work although they hit thermal throttling at 90c almost immediately. With a little bit of forced air from a dock you should be able to bring that down to a much more reasonable 80c

No, no it can’t. Plenty of videos of people putting absolutely stupid powerful fans on tiny heatsinks with big overclocked cpu and it’s unable to keep up until they swap to a bigger heatsink.

There is a limit to how much heat a given amount of heatsink can disperse and there is a limit to how quickly that can transfer to air. If the heatsink is too small no amount of extra airflow will fix it.

I’m sure you’re getting that from the many Reddit comparisons. But in every one of those I’ve looked at the one thing that they forget is that the PS4 is playing at 1080P and the steam deck is playing at 720P.

If you use the official dock on a 1080p monitor the steam deck starts to fall behind the PS4 rather quickly. It is true that on paper the steam deck Apu is getting close to the PS4 but that’s without taking into account the TDP that the steam deck has set or the fact that steam deck is running at a lower resolution.

It gets even Messier when you take into account that not all games will run at 1080p on the ps4, some of them have Dynamic resolution support to maintain better performance at which point comparing the games becomes extremely difficult.

But if you just look at Absolute raw CPU and GPU compute numbers the steam deck isn’t quite at the level of the PS4 which makes sense because it doesn’t have access to quite as much power. It is much newer which is why it gets as close as it does. And if it had a 20 watt TDP I’m willing to bet it could beat it in most things, but as it stands because of the limitations of the cooling necessitating a lower TDP it’s not quite there.

You are correct that arm is generally more power efficient but that’s only the CPU, we don’t know what type of Graphics they will be using and for a gaming device that’s a fairly important piece of information. Nvidia doesn’t really make mobile arm gpus anymore so they can’t go with them, and if they go with one of the Arm based gpus those are significantly behind in terms of performance. They are good enough for your cell phone but they don’t compare to AMD or Nvidia.

This just shows you have no idea how cooling works. The most you could add to the external dock will be a fan, there’s only so much a fan can do the bottleneck is that your systems cooler is simply not large enough. A fan cannot make up for a copper heat sink that is too small, take a good look at the iFixit teardowns of the steam deck and look at how much copper that thing is working with and that’s already one of the larger handhelds. You couldn’t put a ps4 amount of power through that no matter how much fan you gave it

That still requires a cooling system capable of handling the higher power, which will make the unit bigger, heavier, and less portable

Leaks say a lot things, and are almost always wrong. The idea that you could put a PS4 level of performance in a handheld with reasonable battery life is absurd.

Valve put a damn good custom amd apu in the deck, and it’s limited to 15w if they really wanted they could just slap a higher power limit and get way more performance. But then it would run too hot and it’s battery life would be practically non-existent. And considering that was a partnership with AMD to help design that I highly doubt Nintendo has magically figured out something that neither valve nor AMD knew in terms of how to get that kind of performance out of a small power budget

Thankfully on linux we have tools to heavily limit it’s access such as firejail. It doesn’t just get unrestricted root access

I’m very aware of how micro transactions work. I’m trying to say that this game is nowhere near as egregious is literally any of the others on your list. I don’t play a lot, I get on once every maybe couple days and I do a full set of missions so three Maps.

I just about hit level 27 recently, I already have two of the premium more Bonds on locked and then most of the way through them and I am on page 7 of the overall main war bond. I have not spent any money on the game.

I didn’t grind, I didn’t specifically go for things, and I didn’t spend money. You will get absolutely nowhere for free with that type of casual play in any mobile game or League of Legends

The fuck are you talking about, you can unlock everything without ever once spending money. Even if you DID drop thousands that would only give you more bonds and some cosmetics you can’t buy medals. You have to play to unlock things

Usually it’s one flag that actually does something, surrounded by about 8 to 9 flags that do absolutely nothing. “flag soup” as developers like to call it. People add all of them at once and so they assume all of them are doing something when in reality only one of them did anything at all

No need, you can just look at the source code and see that that flag is not defined anywhere. It’s not going to do anything it’s not even being parsed it’s just getting ignored. The creator of dxvk complains about this all the time. People piling on completely useless or redundant flags and spreading them everywhere.

Honestly the site is kind of useless, every time I look at it games that work perfectly out of the box with no changes will practically say that they don’t work at all and vice versa games that don’t work at all will say they run without issue.

Not to mention the amount of people putting literally fucking hundreds of completely worthless flags that actually do literally nothing whatsoever in the code swearing left right and Center that it does something. I kind of wish that site would just disappear

Correct and eve has been very impressive with its per server player counts as well. It’s a completely different type of Beast mind you, trying to keep that many players synchronized over something like a first person perspective real-time movement game is a completely different ball game from keeping spreadsheet simulators synchronized.

Still a very good achievement of optimization regardless but definitely a completely different ball game from synchronizing a first person type content where the players are free to just move in whatever fucking weird ways they want rather than linear vector paths

400 on a single shard (server) that actually quite a lot. It is far far easier to just throw a bajillion different servers at the problem and only have a relatively small player count per server. Having 400 running smoothly on a single server is a very impressive optimization achievement

They did it because the developers said the game will use however many cores you can give it. And i mean, yeah it maxed out all cores. Likely doing nothing but struggling to keep them synchronized but it was using em

It’s funny because I do none of that. I never build any of the luxury goods of any kind no coats no beef jerky no special housing. The game is honestly pretty easy to beat the maps, get to building tools as quickly as you can and then just Spam Glades and send crates to the Citadel easy rep points

It’s actually not lumber yard anymore, it started from that but they’ve Rewritten most of it. And they literally show you the code and such during their like 2+hr devs videos. It’s never going to release but the technology is actually genuinely impressive.

Sadly 16GB just isn’t much anymore. Windows alone will happily eat 4, steam sometimes 2 for no reason (usually not but can happen when it’s web process leaks) games like icarus claim minimum recommendation is 24.

Which is absolutely insane and developers need to get their shit together but it’s just the way things are going.

Yeah you definitely can’t expect extended runtime on battery for anything other than light games like rimworld. I haven’t had any particularly large performance issues with the majority of my library thankfully but I also have a portable battery pack capable of 65 watt charging that is also larger than the steam decks own internal battery so I’m able to more than double the life of my steam deck when I’m not directly next to an outlet

And I guarantee you it has more than that because honestly the verified system is kind of bad. I literally have five games in my library marked as not supported but they play perfectly fine with no issues¯\_(ツ)_/¯