Gamingonlinux and Steamdeckhq are the two sites I follow specifically for steam hardware news, and they’re both pretty good about providing source links and actual info.

Yeah I suck at it a lot. I have a friend who plays a lot, so I thought I could learn by playing with him. But he insists we need to play on harder difficulties so I don’t pick up bad habits, and it makes it nearly impossible for me to progress at all when I play with him.

Decky has multiple save sync plugins that will allow automatic save syncing between different devices. Many of them are just plugin versions of standard file syncing software, that will have a matching PC client.

You have to have both your PC and your deck awake at the same time for most of them to sync though, unless you add a middle point like Google drive that’s always available for sync.

I think two of the options were syncthing and ludensave, but there may be more options or I may be remembering those wrong.

I’ve been playing Granblue Fantasy Relink, and I’ve been really enjoying it. Big DLC for it releases this month, so I’m trying to get caught up to play with friends once the DLC comes out.

Great game, really fun on deck. There are some minor fps drops during character discussions in the town, but performance has been really good during gameplay. Combat system is really fun. There’s a big end game loop that’s similar to monster hunter, where you do boss fights to farm upgrades and materials.

I think redreader has official permission to use the API because it has a disability focus.

True

I don’t know of a way to use the scaling options LS offers on deck, just the frame generation.

Most demanding games have upscaling built in, and the deck already has several scaling options built in, so it’s less of a need than the frame gen options.

My English Achille’s heel

This was clearly a project someone did for fun, it’s not meant to be practical or actually useful. Everyone else understands this and is making jokes about it, and you’re lashing out at people acting like the joke responses were people being serious.

It should be obvious that it’s not actually very helpful to have a controller that can charge itself, if placed within a few feet of a charger, on a perfectly flat surface, under a webcam, with a running computer and webapp managing the whole thing. It also wasn’t useful to make a program to “drive” the controller with wasd. It also wasn’t useful to make a program to sing chiptunes with the vibration motors. It wasn’t even useful for valve to make the controller scream when dropped. It’s just funny, and people are enjoying it.

I was kinda joking with the Roomba comparison.

I could kinda see a use for this where the controller could wake itself up and try to plug itself in if the battery gets low, but the steam controller battery life is so good that it’s a pretty low need

Why would anyone buy a Roomba when they can just vacuum the floor themselves?

I think I saw that Minecraft just added vulkan as a graphics option, but I’m not sure what versions of Minecraft.

This is used on the deck specifically for framegen. Native frame gen options in games add a lot of latency at 30 or less fps, which usually makes them unplayable. Lossless scaling 's framegen option is less accurate in creating the in-between frames, but has far less input latency, making it a viable option.

It doesn’t work for all games, some games will still feel really bad with it enabled. But there are a lot of games where you can use it to run a 30fps game at 60fps, with only slightly more input lag than using a Bluetooth controller.

You’re right about it being underhanded tactics that resulted in the monopoly charge, but it also just seems silly that they could instead say “no other app stores are allowed” and it would suddenly be ok.

Valve specifically released a new installation image that comes with an installer, has added hardware support for non-deck hardware and discrete graphics cards, and has officially updated their support documents to say that it’s supported on more hardware.

You may have a right to install it before, but that doesn’t mean it would have worked or been a good experience.

Xbox/PlayStation/Nintendo don’t have monopolies within the console space.

Also (and this seems stupid to me), having a more open platform can open you up to antitrust lawsuits. In the Epic vs Google and Epic vs Apple lawsuits, apple was ruled to be fine to have a closed app store, but Google was rules to have an illegal monopoly on Android, despite it being the more open platform.

Basically Valve having the Steam Machine be an open platform (or being sold as a PC which is expected to be open) while steering Steam use could be considered more of a monopoly issue, than if they released a stripped down Steam only “console” and advertised it as such.

The brand new SteamOS image apparently does have an installer, but I’m not sure what installation options it has since I haven’t tried it.

Hopefully it does support drives/partitions better than the previous recovery image did.

Presumably PC games are considered their own market, separate enough from console games. It honestly seems murky reasoning to me, but I would imagine valve would be cautious about it since they’re currently facing monopoly lawsuits.

I’ve also read speculation that selling it at a loss could contribute to antitrust lawsuits against them. Basically if they sell gaming PCs below cost, and the gaming PCs incentivize Steam use over other platforms, there would be an argument that Valve was using their 30% sales cut to sell hardware others can’t compete against, to further cement their monopoly. This would be partially countered by the open nature of the device, but not fully since it would still “steer” common users towards steam over other platforms.

This isn’t an issue for console makers because there are multiple competing consoles with valid market share.

Mainly just that there’s constant improvements happening. I’m not sure how far behind it still is, but constant improvements are nice.

For example, I saw a story in my RSS feeds this morning that the open source Nvidia driver just got DLSS support.