I should probably worry more that Firefox on my Steam Deck is basically logged into everything. If it were to be stolen…

I wouldn’t call it an intentional restriction. Not trying to be a Steam apologist, but it would require extra work to make the controller use something other than Steam Input. Or to make a stand-alone Steam Input app. Not doing extra work is not what I would call a restriction. That’s like an Xbox controller not working on PlayStation because Microsoft didn’t put the extra work in to make it compatible. It’s not an intentional restriction. It’s just… extra work.

Ironically, both a PlayStation controller and Xbox controller work in Windows natively. But they don’t have all the fanciness of Steam Input. Steam Input is genuinely insane! I have a Steam Deck and the ways you can customize input are so finely detailed and powerful. They would have to make a standalone app to support all these features, or just give up and make a generic Xinput mode, which I don’t see the point of doing for such a powerful controller. It would be a waste. Just buy an Xbox controller.

I also don’t see it as a big deal to have to install Steam and register non-steam games in order to use the fancy Steam Controller. It’s free software, and you can configure it to start in your Library so you never even see any ads for games on sale. You just start your game, set up your controls perfectly, and you’re good to go. As a company having a near monopoly on PC gaming, Steam is pretty benevolent.

I plan on using this specifically with my docked Steam Deck, so I don’t mind. However, it’s a good point to make.

I don’t think it’s a big deal, though. The entire reason to buy this thing is for the integration with Steam Input and all the cool things you can do with the track pads, Grip Sense and everything else. Steam Input absolutely blows away any third-party input app I’ve ever used in the past from Logitech, Corsair, or whoever. I suppose to be fair, they should release a stand-alone Steam Input program.

If Apple did this, and required… I dunno… fuckin’ iTunes to run their Apple controller, I’d mock them and anyone who buys it, but I guess Valve gets a pass because I’m a fanboy.

I own one Epic game (Fenix Rising), and a few Humble games, and maybe a couple GoG, but 99.9% of the time I’m playing a Steam game anyway. I imagine the controller works fine for running a non-steam game that you’ve registered in your Steam Library.

On Windows, Macrium Reflect is really good for disk cloning. They used to have a free version, but not anymore. Instead, you can use the 30-day trial and get all the features. They specifically support cloning Linux drives intelligently. It doesn’t just go sector by sector, but that’s always a fallback for things like LVM (Linux Volume Manager), which it does not natively support.

https://www.macrium.com/blog/cloning-and-imaging-linux-file-systems-39bffeaf6307

External enclosures for NVMe drives are pretty cheap to help with the cloning. Now that I use Linux on my laptop, I simply took my Windows NVMe out of my computer and stuck it in an enclosure and it still boots off USB. That’s pretty handy. I bought a UGREEN brand one.

Good to hear, and, wow, that’s scary

Awesome, thanks!

Auto Suspend

So what happens? The screen just goes black in the middle of a game? I guess that would be a clue to plug it in, if you’re expecting it.

Right now, having it shut down when you didn’t realize the battery was low is really annoying.

But here’s something I’ve done many times. I pick up my Deck, I turn it on without thinking, and it turns out it’s at 0% (or very close to it), and—as the screen comes on and the CPU wakes up—the voltage has suddenly dropped below the low-voltage shut off, so it shuts down immediately. Really sucks.

I did this like three times before I learned to always plug in the Deck before turning it on if i’m not certain I have good battery.

So what would happen with this plugin installed? Would it wake up and then immediately go to sleep again? Or is there a threshold where it doesn’t check if it should sleep within a certain period since waking up? In that case, it would likely shut down as normal. But I’m wondering if there’s a chance the plug-in catches that and makes it go back to sleep. Because that would be excellent as long as I knew what was happening.

Is it painful to go back to stable from beta? Like, do I risk losing anything… Steam input options, settings, anything like that? I never know when some new-to-me feature I just dicovered is beta or not.

I previously uninstalled Decky because it broke my Steam Deck too often, and the advantages just weren’t compelling enough to deal with that. I’ve wondered several times if going back to the stable branch would make it work better, and if I should try it again, and I’m glad you confirmed that it does.

Makes sense. Like MAME, like the other reply mentioned. No one says Multi Arcade Machine Emulator.

Some of us don’t even know what RPCS3 is, so LBP could have been anything. I get it now. No need to explain. But maybe use fewer initialisms next time.

Orginal Oblivion with mods. I have never played it. I just got the game installed yesterday, and set up in Vortex. Now I have to go grab all the mods, which is very manual. Vortex mod installation links on the Nexus don’t work on the deck. There might be a way to fix that because the mod suggestion list I’m looking at said there’s a way to make links work with Mod Manager 2 on the Deck.

I’m following a curated list of mods that will be a “vanilla+” experience. Not too crazy or anything. It’s called “A Pocket Full of Cheese Wheels” on the Nexus. It comes with a one-click installer shell script that installs Mod Manager 2 and a bunch of other stuff on the Deck but I’m just going to do it manually. The script is old and no longer maintained.

I modded Fallout 3 with Vortex on my Deck, and it was pretty easy when the game is installed on the SD card. I feel like that was key, but I don’t remember exactly why. You also have to symlink the “My Games” folder from the Fallout 3 (or Oblivion) Proton prefix into the Vortex Proton Prefix. That’s so Vortex can manage the INI files and such. Plus you set the SD card as the D: drive in the Vortex Proton prefix so it can see the game’s folder, too. In fact, I think that’s was done automatically done by Steam. Maybe that was why I installed the game on the SD card. But it’s not like you couldn’t make your own drive mapping. It’s a simple symlink named like “d:” or “e:” in the “dos_devices” folder. I don’t see why that couldn’t point to the NVMe drive, but I feel like people online said that wouldn’t work. Vortex is also installed on the SD card.

Maybe some day I’ll document all of this.

You can use any controller with it, though. I bet there will be a lot of people who love their Xbox, PS5 or Gamesir controller and just want to stick with that to save $50 or whatever the price difference will be.

The Steam Machine will not require a Steam Controller.

Clockwise is “ascending”. Scrolling down is ascending alphabetically by default in a file manager, or ascending through paragraphs in a web site or PDF.

It’s ironic that your graphic of time is ascending in a downward direction, but you didn’t understand this.

Oh, I see it now. My bad. I missed him specifically showing that early in the video and later it looked like his left thumb was being used instead, but it’s not.

I even remember looking at my own Steam Deck to see the icon on the “select” button, and it didn’t ring a bell being called the quick access button. (Because it’s not.)

In addition, I mixed up my looking at the button with him zooming in on that button in the video. I would have sworn he did that, and I was about to go take a screenshot of it, but he didn’t. Stupid brain. [In my defense, it turns out I have a fever. 🤧]

Battery Storage Mode

This Steam page says you enter battery storage mode through the BIOS. It doesn’t mention there being an additional hotkey for it. Where did you read that that’s what this key combination does?

Make sure you film the whole process!

It worked for him. 🤷‍♂️

It’s not the “…” button. It’s the, uh, whatever, the “Select” button.

He got it in the end though. I quoted the portion that worked.

If they have to suffer, you have to suffer. It’s the golden rule or something.

Edit: he’s totally wrong about what he did and why. This video is truly garbage.

4:14 Cool. I was was uh was very worried that my Steam Deck wasn’t going to turn on again. So, my understanding of what happened there is that the CMOS just needed to be cleared. Uh, apparently holding the volume up and the quick access menu button while plugging in and some like magic freaking voodoo uh makes it clear the CMOS.

It’s all bullshit. Read this comment instead: https://sopuli.xyz/comment/21922838

Now, Tom doesn’t recommend actually doing this, since it really doesn’t improve any performance and takes away the portability of the Deck, but it is a nice way to “revive” a Steam Deck that doesn’t work anymore.