skulblaka

Thanks for reminding me to get back into Inscryption. I thought that game was neat but dropped it for something else before I learned it has like five acts.

More frequently, I boot the Deck and immediately start a game so it has no time to download anything, and then put it to sleep when I’m done playing. So when using what I would expect to be the standard use case, the deck downloads nothing at all ever until I actually take the time to wake it up and then let it cook for an hour or two, or manually force an update on a game I want to play but can’t because there’s an update out.

I find it hard to believe that Valve expected people to just keep their Deck sitting around with the screen on for multiple hours doing nothing but updating. My Switch downloads updates on sleep mode when plugged into power. The PS5 and Xbox do it. The PS4 did it. Why can’t the deck at least have a toggle option for it?

Ah yes, now if only anyone actually wished to play the game. At all, let alone on Deck.

Honestly I’m kind of in the same boat. Most things I want to play usually are things better done with m+k or otherwise intensive games that won’t play well on the deck. But my partner loves it and has cleared multiple 100+ hour RPGs with it, and that alone was worth the price of admission.

I’ll yield to your expertise for this one, then. My Windows-centrism is showing I suppose. I used to work IT but my environment was overwhelmingly Windows and that colored my perspective of computing as a whole. Excessive uptime was our #1 cause of problems by a massive margin.

Plus I keep forgetting, like a dumbass, that SteamOS is built out of an offshoot of Linux and carries a lot of the benefits of the Linux kernel.

I’m still shutting it down overnight, though.

That’s definitely not true because there isn’t a computer system that exists in the world that is designed for true 24/7 uptime, and the meaningful benefit to shutting it down is both lack of power consumption and system stability. If you keep it on 24/7 it’s going to start crashing frequently after a few months of uptime and you’ll be paying for a non negligible amount of power you’ve used for no reason.

Edit: I stand by my power consumption statement, but re: uptime, my Windows centric history is showing. The Linux gang has shown up to correct me and they should be listened to.

Playstation, Xbox and Switch all download and install updates during sleep mode. Deck should be able to do that as well. If you’re worried about battery life, only allow sleeping downloads when plugged in. Problem solved.

I was very surprised it didn’t ship with those at launch, so there’s likely some licensing or patent issue with Sony over them. I wouldn’t expect to see them outside of Playstation controllers anytime soon.