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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Amazing. One of the best purchases I’ve ever made.

    It’s rare for me to see games in my library that are not supported, although there are a few. But there is a difference between running and running well. Demanding games will get maybe an hour of battery life and the fans will be pretty loud the whole time. Some games (especially strategy games) really work better with a full keyboard and a higher resolution screen. Some games I just would not want to play on a handheld. But most of the time the games that I want to play work well.

    One trick I use to get better battery life and performance is streaming. I use Chiaki to stream from my PS4, and Steam Link (as a non-steam app lol) to stream from my desktop. It’s often worth it for the fan noise reduction alone.

    It’s even better at emulation. It’s a great machine for PS2 and GameCube games- I have the back buttons and track pads mapped to speed up, pause, slow, and rewind gameplay and to control save states. I have not dialed it in yet, but I think with some tweaking you could probably use the gyro and/or track pads to do some good Wii emulation. 3DS and DS are great too, mostly because of the track pads. Anything older emulates fine, but isn’t as impressive.

    I have gotten PS3 and Switch emulation to work, but the fans go on and the battery life goes down, so I don’t really use it for that. Plus storage is a bit tight and PS3 games are huge.

    It does feel like Valve was just a little too early. I wish the screen was 1080p.

    The 2230 SSD’s that it uses were kind of uncommon when it released. The weird size made them more expensive and they had lower capacities. I managed to get a 512GB one, but I wish I could have gotten like 2TB. It seems like that’s changing now though. Similarly, I wish microSD cards came in larger capacities. Storage just seems to get used up so fast these days.



  • Out of the box it works, including cloud saves.

    The only thing I needed my PC for was to upgrade the SSD: I used my desktop to prepare a flash drive with the SteamOS image. Honestly you could probably do that using a USB adapter on the Steam Deck, booting with the original SSD.

    It really comes down to convenience. It takes a minute or so to switch between desktop and gaming modes on the Deck. A lot of stuff is easier if you have a larger screen or two, plus a mouse and keyboard. And file transfers are faster over Ethernet. All of those things you can either work around with the Deck as it is, or you can use a dock or hub to plug in those extra peripherals, but it’s still an inconvenience unless you’re planning on using it docked often.






  • If you want artists to get paid, you need to pay them more directly.

    The highest margin for most is probably merch purchased at venues, including physical media. After that it’s probably the merch store on the artist’s website. They make money off of ticket sales for shows too, but there’s a lot of middle-men and actual costs to shows so there’s a wide variance in profit margin. Even local acts at bars: sometimes it’s a pay-to-play scheme where the band could be losing money, sometimes they’re making a few hundred bucks for a night.

    Streaming on Spotify or an ad-sponsored platform like YouTube is going to give small fractions of a penny per-stream to the artist. There’s plenty of artists out there who have opened their books and shown they make more from releasing music as pay-what-you-want than from Spotify.



  • It looks like this year they’ve had a 10% discount off the cheapest model. So that’s ~$40 off. I think it’s worth waiting the 9 days for the Halloween sale to see. If not, I’d be very surprised if it’s not on sale for Autumn. I would be surprised if any of these sales have a deeper discount than any of this year’s earlier sales though.

    If you plan on replacing the SSD, those will probably go on sale around Black Friday. It would kind of be a pain to settle in with the Deck and get everything set up and installed how you like just to replace the SSD a month later.