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.

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.

GOG sells completely DRM free games. Usually games bought on steam have steam DRM (which is optional, but very uncommon for devs to have it disabled). With any DRM games, if the drm server goes down or if valve goes out of business, you could have your games become unavailable.

With GOG, once you buy the games and download them, you don’t have to ever worry about them stopping working because GOG went out of business or an internet issue.

OBS supposedly works fine, as long as the game isn’t too demanding it should be solid enough.

This is super cool. I hope it works really well, the difficulty of accessing troubleshooting info from discord is such a problem.

We’ve recently seen games that are hard locked to work on Steam Deck hardware specifically, but will be anticheat blocked on any other linux/SteamOS device with different hardware.

So that may not actually work out.

I get it all the time, usually after I play a new game for the first time. It will either say that Valve doesn’t have info on this game yet and ask if it works or not, or it will ask me to confirm whether the existing verified rating is accurate or not.

It only asks one time per game in my experience, and I think you may have had to previously agree to provide feedback on the Steam Deck experience…

Here’s a list of some of the software bundled, although it doesn’t include everything as far as I know.

I don’t personally use it, and I’ve been pretty hands off with my parent’s installs of it after the initial setup, soi can’t really answer either of those questions based on my personal experience of it.

I know of some businesses that have actually ditched windows for Zorin, and I set my aging parents up with it and they’ve been pretty happy with it so far.

So it seems to do well enough as a windows alternative based on those personal observations. I haven’t heard about them witholding security patches though.

Bazzite is basically SteamOS for desktop. Linux is highly flexible in general though, it’s not that important which one you pick most of the time.

I would also like to recommend Zorin for new Linux users, it’s super easy to windows users to swap to and have a good experience.

No, it will say something like “Valve’s testing has this game rated as Steam Deck Verified. Does that match your experience?”

Some games have been delayed from verified because enough people responded “no”.

Oh, yeah you’re right. It’s a beta feature, although it will hopefully come to stable pretty soon.

The decky plugin powertools can also set a limit if you don’t want to wait.

Never underestimate the siren song alure of releasing the least optimized UE5 game ever made. Publishers seem to really struggle with that temptation.