Jesus fucking Christ right?

Like what the fuck were they thinking with that c cable?

They got it right in the dick why did they fuck it up on the main cable.

If I were them I’d be waiting for ARM based processors to catch up in terms of interoperability layers.

Before getting one I couldnt imagine what I would do with it.

Now that I have it I couldnt imagine what I would do without it. I am playing far more games and having more fun doing so. It acted as a drop in replacement for a work computer one week while I had to replace a laptop. Its just a pleasure to use. Games look incredible on it. Once you are comfortable with it, in some ways, its better than a mouse and keyboard (specifically if you have a good key mapping and have developed competence with the touch pads). And I play games like City Skylines, Factorio, BG3, Valheim.

If you want to fall in love and never go back, I would say to play Witcher 3. I think that game was a pure pleasure to play. And getting in 15 minutes of valheim while I’m laying in bed before sleep is something I could never do with a PC.

Right on. I’m just excited that this form factor is going to “be a thing” for a while, because god damn, I love my deck.

But realistically, it could be a drop in replacement for my mobile computing solutions if it was just a bit beefier.

Shiitttttt…

I mean. The ROG Ally has much better hardware…

How did the daily driver experience go?

I did it for a week with an external monitor and I thought it was… fine? Wondering about your experience.

That being said go ahead and pirate, I’m not your dad

What am I letters on a screen? I’m not going to stop you.

Honestly? I think you are getting hung up on approaching this from the T9 perspective.

Yeah well I think you are hung up on the mechanical keyboard community.

The T9 approach worked excellently, was extremely intuitive, and once learned, it is easily as effective as an on screen keyboard.

There just aren’t enough buttons on a deck to have dedicated key mapping and as well would never be intuitive.

This can be overcome by incorporating the philosophy of the T9 keyboard, taking it down to maybe 8-12 total keys you interact with.

Two hands, two flippers (index fingers), 4 keys either side (two thumbs), and you’ve got all the degrees of freedom you need.

But the people who actually used it for SMS/ beepers were few and far between.

I mean, maybe this is true, but not my experience whatsoever. Most people (my circles) once they got the hang of it were typing SMS at 20-30 wpm using T9. My only argument is that alternative keyboards can be effective. I look at the deck (got mine right here) and I see plenty of opportunity (degrees of freedom) to support something along the lines of a T9 keyboard. Like if someone can come up with it, something that’s actually intuitive like T9 was, I really think it would gain generalized acceptance.

This is mapping an RPG/roguelite from old school curses input to a gamepad/touch screen combo. Which, as I said, is a fundamentally “wrong” idea.

I still completely agree with this sentiment, but I don’t think I agree with analog sticks or clusters and wheels. I’m on the same page as the “cool but I am sure as hell not going to learn that” category for any solution like this.

Lets say we just either the back l/r paddles and l/r top switches, along with 4 buttons left and 4 buttons right. Like, I’m playing with the positions with my fingers now. Maybe press paddle or switch, press either a left or right one of 4 options and complete it by pressing one of the opposing left or right one 4 options.

So (4^3)/2 (lets make it direction so that the target key is always found in a ‘caret’ formation (starts left, goes right, ends left; or starts right, goes left, ends right). That means for each of the 8 keys (4 left, 4 right), there would be 8 potential positions, which gives us a final 128 potential keybindings. We could probably sacrifice some fractional degrees of freedom here to make it more intuitive (like maybe its only 6 potential positions for a given initial key/ paddle combo).

Like I think its super doable.

This is ABSOLUTELY what I’ve wanted from the steam deck from the first minutes I got my first deck. Being able to work in the desktop mode without having to use the onscreen keyboard has been a fundamental limiting factor for me.

So I do have to push back against this statement:

The only intuitive way to map the qwerty keyboard to the steam deck is through the context of a specific game’s controls and what they usually map to on a keyboard.

Case in point, I want to use the steam deck as a productivity device. I need a ‘generalized’ mapping of keys.

I’m interested in knowing what you think of the oldschool T9 keyboard mapping. I’ve been thinking for a long time that something similar to this would work for the deck.

I whole kindheartedly disagree. I don’t know that “this” is it, but a touch screen is a POOR supplement for a keyboard.

Maybe you are a bit younger, maybe you don’t didn’t have them, but T9 was one of the best typing experiences out there; I still consider it an improvement to onscreen keyboards on modern smartphones.

I think that this effort is precisely what I’ve been looking for as a daily steam deck driver; I want this specifically for the KDE environment. In combination with the trackpads, I think a key-bound button/ switch based keyboard is all I need for the steam deck to be a 100% drop in replacement for a laptop.

I want that cyber punk lifestyle of being able to program on my deck and do a whole lot more with it. For that to work, I can’t be switching over to some goofy touch screen key board.

Yeah it was a blast, like, incredibly pleasurable to play.

The controller layout and the steam deck layout just mapped excellently. Everything felt incredibly organic, almost as if the game was designed for the deck.

I’m on BG3 now and its not nearly as good of an experience. The graphics feel lacking compared to W3. I’m not sure I’ve got it tuned correctly. The key mapping is ‘so so’; I play city skylines and its way better mapping for a mouse based click and do stuff game.

The key mapping / controller layout and zoom / perspective questions are the make it or break it for any game on deck. I really like the steam deck controller set up (in-spite of the fact that before the deck, I’m almost exclusively a keyboard and mouse gamer). I like how flexible the set up is, but I feel like not enough games are taking advantage of the options and the community layouts are hit and miss.

I played the entire game through on the deck. It played excellently.

I mean, you are trying to ride a moped in a formula 1 race there buddy.

cp2077 is one of the most demanding games there is. Its a miracle you can run it on deck at all.

I mean, I don’t know your use case, but as a self-hoster/ research scientist, I think my usage is much much. And I do rely on mine for business, as my wife and I both rely on it for hosting our data, which for me is large geospatial datasets, and when I’m doing large compute runs, there are many many read writes. We also store a large amount of music/ videos for streaming and running a jelly fin server. Thats been fine as well. I think since in our case we don’t have a ton of people hitting the server at once, its just never as stressed as it might be in a corporate/ multi user environment.

No issues what’s so ever. Have them in a four drivE QNAS. I was a bit concerned about them being cheaper drives initially but after I got them installed I literally haven’t thought about them again in terms of reliability.

0 complaints and they seem to be doing about as well as some more expensive drives might be.

I * think * those were the brand I bought?

Regardless, 80 for 12 TB is a steal.

Bad thing that it happened. Good thing that its 100% repairable.

Um.

Can we have this in Ubuntu?