I absolutely dig the Steam Deck, but it’s not a console in that regard, it’s not software restricted in any way, it’s just a portable computer with a convenient frontend. But… man, I’m more likely to pick it up than to play on my gaming rig these days, even though both can hook up on the TV. Handhelds are just great.
They’re just undercooked PCs with artificial software restrictions now. Except for the Switch, which is an undercooked TV streamer chip from 2015, also with artificial software limitations.
Hasn’t been anything exciting about consoles in over a decade.
It’s a monument to human achievement that they work
as well as they doat all.
FTFY.
I’m in my forties and what you’re describing doesn’t sound normal at all. I beat myself up good in my younger years with sports and still do somewhat regular cardio and weightlifting. I have a bum knee and hip problem, shoulder issues from weightlifting injuries, and my back gets stiff and sore on a good day.
None of that stops me from functionally living, and none of its anything the occasional ibuprofen or toke won’t fix in the short term. I can still exercise, do physical labor, open all the jars, and be generally active, and without pain the majority of the time.
What you’re describing sounds more like an inflammatory disease or auto-immune disorder. 110% get a second opinion from a different doc, or a third if needed.
I spend a bunch of time in log reviews in my current role. “Googling the error message” image is literally hanging on my office wall.
Use the latest proton GE and set the following launch options:
PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1 PROTON_NO_FSYNC=1 %command%
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.
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.
steam://controllerconfig/413080/2866090215
Try this config. I posted about it above. It’s worked well for me to the point I’m no longer even comfortable playing GW2 on a keyboard, I’m able to react much more quickly to everything with the gamepad setup. Most important thing is always use action camera for combat and general exploration unless you specifically need the mouse for something.
Here you go: steam://controllerconfig/413080/2866090215
Paste that steam link in a browser while Steam is open and it will pull up the controller config.
Control mappings have face buttons and R1/R2 as attacks, L1/L2 as button layer modifiers, Joystick mouse and more. F-keys are on the d-pad, and most mouse related functions are active while holding L1. Pressing L2+R2 heals. Back button is your "interact. L1 + R3 switches between “action” camera and regular mouse mode for aiming. Action camera is better for combat, and is the mode I use like 90% of the time. Dodge is on R3. L3 swaps weapons. There’s also key combos for all the mounts, special action abilities (N key, on L2+back)… basically, everything you could possibly want to do in-game, there’s a controller way to do it. You may need to remap some of the mount buttons, I forget if I did custom mappings for some of those, as I have a lot of mounts (everything except roller beetle and gryffon).
Hope it works for you. I think it’s a great config, but my perspective may be skewed since I’m highly accustomed to it from muscle memory and using it for years (with Xpadder even, before steam controller mapping was a thing). I’ve used this config for every single class in the game and dialed it in so I can play literally any class without issues, including ones that have a number of aiming skills like engineer and elementalist. Actually, elementalist is a blast for this, dpad was perfect for switching elements compared to fumbling with F-keys.
I dunno about this one. Waiting to see what the crowd thinks as far as reviews. Secrets of the Obscure was as mediocre as they come and I have doubts now.
I’ve been playing it on a gamepad since 2012. I’ll see if I can get my Steam config link for you later.
I played it for 440 hours and I still don’t feel done with it.
Have a ton of games already, but I picked up Nuclear Blaze and Streets of Rogue on the cheap.
A week prior to the steam sale, got a good deal on River City Girls 2 and Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries on Fanatical, $15 for both together.
Well, with Steam Deck and supposedly upcoming new Steam Machine, that’s a perfectly decent target without restrictive software limitations and closed ecosystems. Plus, PCs are pretty standardized these days in general. Nobody needs to target the high end, and Valve does a hardware survey that’s publicly available to know exactly what hardware range is in use (and it’s generally the lower end, despite enthusiasts).
And I’ll keep ignoring them because there’s no reason for them to exist now, there aren’t architectural differences and unique capabilities that make sense for games to be exclusive anymore. That’s more of the artificial software restrictions I mentioned. Console exclusives can die in a fire. Even Sony has realized they’re leaving money on the table with that crap and releasing to PC.