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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Automatic updates are there with the right distro. Which highlights the need to look around for the right distro for the use case.

    Example being Opensuse Aeon - automatic updates - doesn’t even tell you it’s happening, just pops up “your system was updated” out of nowhere

    Automatic rollback - if an update broke something you would never know, at boot the system will pick the previous snapshot with no user intervention

    As far as the user is concerned you just have a working system; that it is the entire goal of that distro


  • I tried to find the github issue, but it’s eluding me, so I’m going to go into detail since I spent about 3 weeks troubleshooting this.

    Hard crash when playing a game. Restarts steam deck with a “verifying installation” message.

    This happens anywhere from 2-15 minutes of playtime. Game didn’t matter, Terraria, Skyrim, Borderlands 1, Dave the Diver, Shredders Revenge, Doom 2016 … It was also reported by users with both LCD and OLED decks, so hardware revision didn’t matter either.

    Anecdotally you find people saying that some of these steps work:

    Memory retraining, re-imaging steam deck, Flashing different bios versions, Messing around with gpu clocks

    But almost all of those threads loop back to the OP saying something like “nope, still crashing”. Any reprieve they did have seemed to be coincidental.

    Valve themselves recommend those first two steps and then an RMA if it doesn’t fix it.

    A Brazilian user in the issue tracker worked out you can flash BIOS 0116, and disable two specific memory power management flags. I believe the settings are hidden in other versions of the BIOS.

    A Valve rep on the tracker confirmed that would work, but suggested not to do it as the deck is not functioning properly and needs to be replaced. They then closed the issue and advised to only use that fix if you can’t RMA.

    Worth noting, 0116 is a pre-OLED BIOS, and can only be flashed to the LCD models. There is no way to reveal these BIOS flags on the OLED model, so you can only RMA in that case.

    This has absolutely solved the problem. But I think I’m having a few dodgy side effects that weren’t happening before, like updates failing, and USB connection has become iffy and needing a few restarts to recognise devices are plugged in.

    At least I can play games again, which work flawlessly now.



  • My partner bought me one a few months ago from Kogan for my birthday. But it does have a problem which needs to be RMA’d and I knew there was no hope of that.

    I thought we could try our luck with Kogan returns, but they only have the OLED model now so don’t know how that would go. Especially as it appears to work fine ( until you get 5 - 10 minutes in-game then it hard crashes).

    I found on the github issue tracker for steamOS someone from Brazil (who also had to resort to grey imports) found a way to flashback to an older BIOS and adjust memory power settings. That fixed it, but it’s a bit bodgy and introduces other issues.

    This is a known issue that the Steam rep on the issue tracker said only follow that process if you absolutely can’t RMA it. They closed the issue in the basis that you just RMA it if it happens.








  • Absolutely. Look at Aeon. I turn it on and do what I need to do.

    Later I might see a quick pop up that says system has been updated. It didn’t require intervention. It didn’t even tell me it was happening, it just informed me after the fact.

    If anything broke, I would never know because on the next boot if something failed it just uses the previous snapshot to boot. As far as I am concerned the system is working just like it always has.

    But even as recently as this week I see people saying: immutable? No don’t make it a bad experience for them! Just recommend Ubuntu for newcomers! >:/


  • I use the Steam controller, (obviously not helpful since they don’t make it anymore) most of the time.

    I also have the remake of the old Xbox “duke” from a few years back. The largeness of it in my smaller hands always felt surprisingly comfortable. It’s wired and recognised as generic xbox one controller - BUT only when running steam. If steam isn’t open, then the controller continuously turns off and back on every 20 seconds.

    I have a few DS4 controllers sitting here that still work. Eh. Not much use but they work fairly well. I don’t really like the PlayStation control design.

    I have never tried a Switch / Switch-compatible controller on yet. My partner has a couple for… the Switch! But I’m hoping they do well because I just bought my daughter a Sonic-themed, Gamecube-style wired controller for her upcoming birthday (she obsessed with Sonic and saying she wants to play a game one day instead of just watching). It would be good if she can just take it between playing Switch with her mum or PC with me.

    Final comments -it’s wired or replaceable batteries for me. So many dead DS3 and DS4 controllers sitting around from years back that won’t charge, or last about 15 minutes. But wires never get in the way anyway, and I always have eneloop AAs ready to go.