Oh and the battery can drain out pretty fast too.
Depends if you have the OLED or the LCD model. The OLED has been surprisingly good with battery. For really high end games that max out the deck it’s maybe 2.5 to 3 hours, but for most games I’m getting between 5.5 and 8 hours battery, and for low spec indie games and lower end emulation like GBA it can run for up to 12 hours in some cases.
I bought the 512 GB OLED back in May with no regrets. I’m surprised how quick I am to turn in the Steam Deck now instead of booting up my gaming PC. I wouldn’t say it’s changed how I play, since I already tend to game with a controller, but it’s great fun, and so far I don’t think I’ve encountered a single game in my Steam Library that wouldn’t run. Plus, I love handhelds and portable devices in general.
A few games have needed minor tweaks (proton version, a fix that would also be needed in Windows), but everything has worked. As a disclaimer though, I don’t play online competitive games, just single player and co-op stuff with my wife, so YMMV.
On the other hand, I’ve found some games work that I couldn’t even run decently in Windows. Like Rainbow Six: Vegas. On Windows it would never properly work with a controller but on the Deck it was no problem. And Silent Storm ram out of the box, no tweaks at all. Linux is awesome like that for older titles.
It’s also been great for emulation, at least through PS2 and GameCube, I don’t emulate much above those. Emudeck is nice, and I was already familiar with EmulationStation since I use that on a Powkiddy X55, so that was nice.
One thing I will say is a game changer is the suspend function. Being able to tap the power button and sleep it at any time and then pick up where you left off later is amazing. Reminds me of the old Nintendo DS, just shut the lid and get back to it.
All told, I’m really happy with it.
Performance improvement plan. Sometimes a legitimate way to help an employee who is slow or failing at tasks to improve and perform better.
More often it’s a management ploy to start a paper trail to legitimize terminating said employee or deny pay raises without repercussions, regardless of actual performance metrics.
DNS is often misconfigured.
On the linux side of things, people like to manually edit /etc/resolv.conf when it’s actually a symlink and changes to it don’t persist on boot (the real file location varies, but it’s usually in something like /etc/system/resolve). And forget bind9, if it’s not MS DNS it’s not DNS to some folks.
On the Windows side, people love to ignore that reverse DNS exists, even though so many things use it. They also freaking love CNAME aliases and break stuff in interesting ways (for example, a “load balanced” configuration that’s all just the first node acting as all three nodes of a cluster or pool).
Many people only know enough DNS to be dangerous and come up with really jank workarounds to get things running because they don’t understand the proper solutions.
Same. I was very impressed by the games that work despite being unsupported. Heck, I’ve got Rainbow Six: Vegas working on it with gamepad support. I couldn’t even do that in Windows.
Give me more of this and less of the politics. This is what I come to Lemmy for.
My understanding is Retrodeck is a cleaner install, being self contained as a flatpack… and that is.
Emudeck works with standalone emulators that are just hooked into EmulationStation. That means more frequent updates. Also, Emudeck supposedly had better performance due to this, but take that with a grain of salt.
Honestly Arch-based is a good choice, but straight up Arch for a newbie? Nah.
I’m running EndeavorOS with KDE and it’s been solid for gaming. A few bugs, but mostly minor, like it picked the wrong default NIC driver (but still worked) and SMB shares wouldn’t auto mount recently until an update a week or two ago.
My main PC for non-gaming runs Manjaro. I know there are haters about it, but it’s been a solid distro for general use, and I’ve encountered no issues to speak of.
Well. in the modern day, there’s Ubuntu 22.04 and up with their insistence on snaps for many otherwise native apps. For example, Firefox as a snap and taking anywhere from 30 seconds to up to 2 minutes to launch when you first open it.
I used Ubuntu for years, pretty much from 16.04 all the way up to 22.04 but that was a line for me and I ditched it for Manjaro. The experience has been much better overall.
Snaps should be for applications that may not receive updates on current systems or have a hard dependency on old libraries for some reason. Things like Spek come to mind. To use if for something like Firefox, and not only use it, but insist on it to the point you can’t install the native version without ridiculous workarounds… it’s absurd. And on top of this, it’s especially dumb because flatpak already existed prior to snap, but as usual Canonical had to be special instead of working with community standards.
Amazon based search results integrated in the Unity dash beg to differ. Canonical has a history of being shitty.
You’re not likely to do that for $150. You might be able to pull an old Dell Precision T5500 tower with a weak Xeon on eBay for cheap and refit it with more ram, better CPU and cheap non-redundant storage for $200 - $250.
For sake of power requirements though, seriously consider your use case and needs. You can get by pretty well with cheap mini-PCs like Intel NUCs or AMD minis like Beelink for pretty cheap and just cluster them with something like Proxmox to scale out instead of up when you need additional resources. This will be reasonably priced and keep the power bill and noise levels down.
I use the wired version, is the wireless rf or bt?
I have one at both of my desks and it’s the best mouse (trackball or otherwise) that I’ve ever used.
Hey, check out the resmed airsense 10 autoset card-to-cloud version. It’s a lot cheaper and has no cellular connectivity, no wireless module. I just found out about it tonight, thinking of buying one as a backup machine. Looks like it ticks all your boxes.
CPAP.com has a starter bundle for it right now for $400.
I currently use a Resmed Airsense 10 and can’t recommend it enough; best sleep I’ve ever had.
Just avoid anything by Philips Respironics. They’ve been messing around hard, class action suits and recalls and haven’t really made anyone whole from the debacle (myself included, I came out of pocket to replace my old Dreamstation).
Just use OSCAR to get the data locally from the SD card.
https://www.sleepfiles.com/OSCAR/
Learn more about the machine and do your own management as well. It’s very easy to get into the machine settings to control your air flow, temperature settings, and so on. Take the time to learn what the data from the machine means.
I’m fairly certain I’m ND, but never fully knew if it was Autism (Aspergers?) or ADHD. Mom never followed up on the testing when I was a kid (and neither did I as an adult), but autism runs high in my family, and I have low and high functioning extended family.
Yeah, definitely not ADHD. I have issues, stims, triggers, but I’m functional, and can definitely form habits, and don’t necessarily experience the issues noted here.
If you have Plex pass there’s a built in auto leveling setting, but it’s not available on the free version.
Alternately foobar2000 or other tools can apply replaygain but you’ll need a tender that will actually use it. I use Asset UPnP.
Use the latest proton GE and set the following launch options:
PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1 PROTON_NO_FSYNC=1 %command%