Does the CLI still work? If so, you could download and play all the Windows 7 compatible, DRM-free games in your library just fine. Alternatively, if you already had these games installed, they’ll work fine without launching Steam first.
full mirrors of YT
Yeah…not going to happen.
Sounds cool, I just fail to understand how this takes Cinnamon “out to the real world”.
The feature itself is great. It records the last two hours by default and lets you easily create clips from that. The editor is right there in the Steam overlay, it’s pretty great.
I only used it under Linux, and that’s where I’d say it is still very much a beta experience. I have an AMD Radeon 7800 XT. Most of the time, Steam picks up on its hardware acceleration - sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, it falls back to CPU encoding (obviously) which occupies around 3-4 cores on my 7950X3D to record 3440x1440 at the highest quality setting. GPU encodes are H.264 even though the GPU is perfectly capable of encoding AV1. Performance impact ranges from almost zero to as much as 30%, which seems a bit excessive. On some games that have a splash screen (Sea of Thieves for example), all it will record is said splash screen, even when it’s not shown anymore: you get gameplay sounds, but the video is just a static image with mouse cursor artifacts. It didn’t record sound from one of the microphones I tried. After swapping it out for a different one, my voice is being recorded. At least one session the shortcut for saving a clip just resulted in an error sound instead of a clip being saved.
So it’s a bit disappointing so far. Yeah, Linux shenanigans and relatively small user base, but Valve out of all companies should treat Linux as a first-class platform. Yes, they do a lot for Linux, with Proton and whatnot. But ironically Steam itself is only in an “okay, it kind of works” state. No official packages for anything but apt-based distributions and Wayland (scaling) support is meh at best.
It did seem to work a lot better on the Steam Deck with very little performance impact in my short testing, so there’s that.
What’s Ullr?
Let me guess without reading: kernel-level anti-cheat?
Include adding kernel level anti cheat to that. This should just give us an option to get a full refund.
Sounds about right. There are some valid and good use cases for “AI”, but the majority is just buzzword marketing.
The main thing (by far) degrading a battery is charging cycles. After 7 years with say 1,500 cycles most batteries will have degraded far beyond “80%” (which is always just an estimate from the electronics anyway). Yes, you can help it a bit by limiting charging rate, heat and limit the min/max %, but it’s not going to be a night and day difference. After 7 years with daily use, you’re going to want to swap the battery, if not for capacity reduction then for safety issues.
Technically, wired charging degrades the battery less than wireless charging, mainly because of the excessive heat generated by the latter. The same way slower wired charging generates less heat. Lower and upper charging limits also help (the tighter the better).
But I personally don’t bother with it. In my experience, battery degradation and longevity mostly comes down to the “battery lottery”, comparable to the “silicon lottery” where some CPUs overclock/undervolt better than others. I’ve had phone batteries mostly charged with a slow wired charger degrade earlier and more compared to almost exclusively wireless charging others. No battery is an exact verbatim copy of another one. Heck, I had a 2 month old battery die on me after just ~20 cycles once. It happens.
Sure, on average you might get a bit more life out of your batteries, but in my opinion it’s not worth it.
The way I see it with charging limits is that sure, your battery might degrade 5% more over the span of 2 years when always charging it to 100% (all numbers here are just wild estimates and, again, depend on your individual battery). But when you limit charging to 80% for example, you get 20% less capacity from the get go. Unless of course you know exactly on what days you need 100% charge and plan your charging ahead of time that way.
Something I personally could never be bothered with. I want to use my device without having to think about it. If that means having to swap out the battery one year earlier, then so be it.
I guess you could sell a literal copy, yeah. But ironically, the lack of DRM binding that copy to an account by a user makes a “proof of original ownership” harder, if that’s what you want.
That’s not how it works with digital goods, but that’s a limitation of digital goods really.
They don’t even know what they want to do themselves.
If you’re talking about Steam, while it provides its own DRM system, games can be published on there without any DRM whatsoever, so you can do whatever you want with the downloaded files and then play the game without Steam.
The article links an article from March '24 talking about the introduction of these devices that contains this part:
The scanner that Adams and police officials introduced during Thursday’s news conference in a lower Manhattan station came from Evolv, a publicly traded company that has been accused of doctoring the results of software testing to make its scanners appear more effective than they are.
So they could never be trusted but were still allowed to proceed.
iFixit rates it “Difficult” for the Steam Deck OLED and says the time required is 2-3 hours:
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Steam+Deck+OLED+Battery+Replacement/168676
This is a slight improvement from the original Deck’s estimated 2-4 hours:
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Steam+Deck+Battery+Replacement/149070
It requires removing quite a few parts but the most annoying part is getting rid of the adhesive. It doesn’t have easy-to-access pull tabs or whatever.
They can certainly improve this. Either add pull tabs to the adhesive strips, or better yet use the mechanism from the iPhone 16 where you apply voltage to the adhesive to make dissolve/no longer stick. Or even better make it a screw-in battery without any glue whatsoever. Then update the routing of several cables so they aren’t in the way of removing the battery.
Understandable.
What I will say though is that I personally wouldn’t mind regular spec bumps at all. The Deck isn’t exactly a cheap device and to get the “latest and greatest” for your “investment” at any given point of purchase would help longevity.
But as I said, in this case it makes a lot of sense (for Valve). SteamOS is still under heavy development, even more basic stuff such as the update mechanism and also power management is something they’re still working to improve.
They also use a custom APU designed in collaboration with AMD, and these designs cost a lot of money. It’s not just a rebranded 7840U like the Z1 Extreme for example. This custom design makes a lot of sense in terms of focusing on gaming performance and efficiency, and it clearly shows in (very) power limited scenarios.
Either way, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a new Steam Deck based on Zen 5 and RDNA 4 with another custom designed APU sometime in 2025 or early 2026. Zen 2 is really starting to show its age and Zen 5 is a solid leap even over Zen 4 (not talking about desktop CPUs here, but Ryzen AI 300). RDNA 4 will likely improve quite a bit over RDNA 3(.5) (with the current Deck having RDNA 2) and include some type of hardware-accelerated machine learning upscaling with FSR4, which could make a lot of sense on the Deck as long as enough games support it.
I’d also like to see a few other improvements. The OLED display is great in many aspects, but VRR would be a great feature to have. Internally I’d like to see an easier way to swap the battery, maybe using similar tech to what Apple does with the iPhone 16’s battery. Currently, swapping the battery is one of the most complex repairs on the Deck, but it’ll also be the most common a few years down the line when all these batteries really start to show their age.
I think we’ll get at least one more x86 Steam Deck generation before it moves to ARM (if it moves to ARM at all).
The Snapdragon X isn’t anything to write home about when it comes to efficiency under load, with the newest CPUs (with iGPUs) from AMD and Intel keeping up or maybe even exceeding it.
Happy cake day!
Bitwarden keeps working just fine.
I have several components in my network that are at least 6 years old. Is that a problem…?