Fubarberry @ Fubarberry @sopuli.xyz

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It's always been weird to me that more handhelds don't use trackpads, especially when windows basically requires a mouse. As far as the first non-steam deck handheld to have dual trackpads though, that award goes to the Ayaneon Kun:

The SAG-AFTRA strike is pretty nasty for a lot of voice actors. Basically from what I understand, they're striking to try to protest AI taking over voice acting roles.

A lot of times unions help their members get jobs though companies that have a contract with the union. If the union strikes, these members are somewhat safe because nearly all of the workers for that company come through the union. However SAG-AFTRA encouraged their members to get non-union conteact jobs, and then also forced them to go on strike at those jobs. This strike has been going on for over 9 months now, and a lot of smaller voice actors are losing their jobs.

SAG-AFTRA is throwing a fit about the Darth Vader AI voice thing (when the family was fully on board and agreed to let it happen), while completely ignoring all the voice actors who have been forced out of work for 9 months by the strike and are losing their contracts.

Windows uses a lot of power just existing, so you can't get any of the windows handhelds down to a low power consumption. I remember when the Rig Ally first came out, the verge tested it using 5-8w of power on the steam deck, and using 16-22w of power on the Ally. Some of that is the hardware (the Deck has a really power efficient chip for low power games), but a lot of it is windows.

My understanding is that vulkan is generally more efficient than directX.

While proton enables that, that's still just vulkan outperforming DirectX.

So technically proton isn't improving performance here, it's just allowing the game to run on better performing systems (like Linux and vulkan).

I'm not sure what you're saying. Proton is incredible obviously, but by itself it doesn't make games run better. Using vulkan instead of DirectX could improve performance, but presumably most of the performance gain is from not running windows in the background.

If you want something capable of running at an actually steady frame rate I'm not sure any computer can accomplish that without some serious tweaking.

Also if you're wanting to play on deck you might try this guide.

Yeah you're right, I had mostly been looking at the difference between the steam deck and legion Go S on that chart and barely even noticed the difference between windows on the legion Go S there.

My understanding is it's mostly just the advantage of not having windows running hogging resources, so it should be a bigger gain for CPU bound games.

**Edit ** There can be performance gains from using vulkan over DirectX too, so there probably are GPU gains as well. It will depend on the game though

I think this screenshot is pretty telling.

Previously it was only enabled for select titles, with this update they have it enabled by default for all titles.

Anything that has win32 controls should now have controller support on the launcher window if you have proton experimental as your compatibility layer.

The valve time distortion bubble is real unfortunately. Thankfully it finally caught up.

No one had posted the actual patch notes yet when I pinned this, and the headline on this one covers what's probably the most significant news item about this update.

Personally I really like reading the patch notes directly, but it seems like usually it's the articles talking about the changes like this that get more traction on lemmy and other sites. I think having the patch notes directly linked in a comment here is a nice middle ground of having the higher traction headline/article and the more info rich patch notes both easily accessible.

Updated the SteamOS recovery image for repairing SteamOS on Steam Deck and Legion Go S. If you would like to test SteamOS on your own AMD powered handheld, you can use this SteamOS recovery image and follow the instructions here.

Unless I missed a previous update to the SteamOS recovery image, this is pretty huge. The old steamOS recovery image had some major bugs like crashing the wifi card if you tried connecting to a wifi 6 network with the OLED deck. Losing the ability to use wifi while trying to install/recover steamOS was a real headache, but I'm guessing that's fixed now.

Most linux OS with locked down file systems allow you to install apps permanently if you need something that doesn't work with flatpak/distrobox/etc. It's usually called something like atomic updates, and it installs the software in a layered image, and will require a reboot to load.

It's not the ideal way to install software, but it's a lot easier than your options for installing packages on SteamOS.

I haven't personally used Bazzite, so I'm not 100% sure that it supports it, but I'm assuming it does. If anyone else wants to confirm it I would appreciate it. Edit: you can, here's the documentation page on it

Rockstar recently switched to a kernel anti-cheat program that doesn't support the deck, breaking online. You can still play the single player versions of those games, but not online unfortunately.

Ah, the cross post didn't cross post everything. Fixing it now.

Ok, I missed that changing controller profiles fixed it.

I'd still recommend trying the global toggles, that will let us know whether it's haptic feedback or simulated rumble. From there we can hopefully narrow down what's going on with the control scheme.

There's two kinds of haptics with the trackpads, one is haptic feedback when using the trackpad, the other is simulating controller rumble using the trackpad haptic feedback.

I'm guessing it's one of these two causing the vibration. you can individually disable them by pressing the QAM button (the ". . ." button), going to the gear menu, and scrolling down to the bottom where there should be toggles for game rumble and steam haptics.

I also might try switching to a different control profile and see if it still happens. Ideally a pretty blank profile where the left stick is configured to let you move and that's it.

Great interview!

I appreciate GB calling kernel anticheat a fad, but going by his own 4 pillars of big tech, it doesn't seem like something that companies will give up willingly. Funnily enough I think our best chance of getting rid of kernel anticheat might be government action. A lot of the biggest anticheats are either wholly or partially owned by chinese companies, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if the current administration bans them over that.

In general though his answers are all really solid, I agree with basically everything he said here.

That Polygon Doom video is always good for a laugh, it's so painful to watch. I've heard people say the guy playing it had a broken hand and was having to play one handed. No idea if that's true, but it would explain a lot, but still makes it super weird that he was the one picked to show off the game.

I'm interested in trying the new Savage Planet game. The first one was like a comedy/indie game on Metroid Prime (which is a favorite series of mine). I'm curious if the new one will still have that Metroid Prime feel now that they've swapped to 3rd person.