That’s super cool, and the fact that it splits in two means it will still be a uniquely cool option once we get an actual steam controller 2.

I don’t have experience with that game specifically, but generally most games are easier to run through steam than through a 3rd party store. You often have to manually identify missing .dll files and install them through winetricks/protontricks to get games to work. The EA launcher in general doesn’t play nice with Steam Deck, so I don’t know if you’ll be able to get it working.

It’s worth noting that the steam version of Battlefront 2 didn’t work well either for a long time, due to the EA app. My understanding is it works now, but the game still has some general issues with crashes and stuff. Some recommendations people made are to run the game in windowed or borderless (not fullscreen), to let the game sit on the main menu for 30 seconds before trying to play anything, and to maybe try forcing proton 9 instead of proton 10 or experimental.

You have to be careful about that too, the code isn’t written to be easily understood by casual reading.

For example, the code will describe your hot, neutral, and ground wires as “ungrounded, grounded, and grounding” wires. Applying rules meant for a “grounding” wire to a “grounded” wire can have serious issues.

The whole code is written like that, where it’s really easy to get confused if you don’t understand the exact terminology it uses.

As an electrician, it’s difficult to give good electrical advice over the internet.

First of all, you don’t know how capable someone actually is at doing work. There’s both a knowledge and a technique requirement for quality work. Bad electrical work can easily cause house fires and death, if I tell someone online how to fix an issue, and they electrocute themselves or burn down their house, I’m partially responsible for that.

Second, it’s hard to give good advice on how something should be done without seeing it in person. Small details that are hard to get from a description or image can change how stuff is required to be done, and the code is complicated and has lots of exceptions and different requirements. Also different areas have different code requirements, and different AHJ requirements, so fully accurate advice has to come from an electrician in your actual area.

Final thing I’ll mention is that getting qualified as an electrician is hard. Getting a full electrical license where I live requires 8 years of experience (4 years being directly supervised, then 4 years of light supervision). You also have to pass a pretty difficult exam, electricians usually spend 6+ months studying hard and taking training classes for the exam, and then it still has an abysmal first attempt pass rate and normally takes many attempts to eventually pass. Ultimately after all of that (8 years, months of focused study and classes, multiple test attempts), 25-30% of people are never able to pass and get their full license.

With all that considered, I’m happy to give advice to other electricians online. If they’re already certified I can have some confidence that they have the knowledge and skills to do a good job with any advice given. However trying to give actually good, responsible advice to someone who is uncertified and a complete unknown on terms of skill/knowledge/location with only a partial knowledge of their problems and setup, it’s hard. It’s much easier to recommend they just get a licensed electrician from their area to take a look at it.

True, but he’s mainly wanting a keyboard setup for it. This is only slightly thicker than the keyboard by itself, and reduces the pieces he has to bring with him to keyboard + glasses.

There’s also the added memory of a guy sitting in a coffee shot wearing sunglasses, typing away on a keyboard without a computer in sight. Should be an excellent start to roleplaying a blind schizophrenic at starbucks.

With FBC Firebreak, I see a lot of steam reviews blaming the lack of game content. It sounds like the game was good during the closed alpha tests when weapons/unlocks were all available, but in an attempt to provide a slow drip feed of content, the final game is very barebones with most stuff locked behind free battlepass progression.

If that is the case, it’s unfortunate that another potentially good game is being ruined by the live service model.

I tried jump ship, and it only got about 20fps in the starting area. Tweaking graphical settings didn’t really seem to help, so I put it off to try on my PC later.

Does it get better performance later? Or did you find a better setting for it?

My favorite demo I played was Clover Pit, it’s by the devs of Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom, and could lazily be described as balatro meets a slot machine. In reality it’s more different from balatro, it has it’s own retro horror vibe and some other interesting things going on. I enjoyed it, and found myself itching to play it more.

Nothing else clicked with me unfortunately. Jump Ship looked cool but didn’t run well on the deck, Brave Junction is a blackjack StS type game by rideonjapan but didn’t quite click with me. I tried a few other games but nothing hooked me.

FBC Firebreak is now officially steam deck verified as well

I’m excited for it as a remedy game, but I’m worried that it may be another example of a talented studio getting pushed into an unfamiliar multiplayer game, chasing trends. I also don’t think the name is doing them favors, I don’t think it’s clear that it’s tied to Control/Alan Wake universe enough to help sales, but it also doesn’t feel suitable as a standalone game name either. Anyways we’ll see how it goes, hopefully it will be great and be really successful.

I’d recommend looking at the articles I linked, I probably should have refreshed my memory on them better before commenting.

In addition to knowing that valve is working on compatibility layers for running x86 on arm devices, there was also a steamVR update 9 months ago contains files for an ARM device code named deckard. There’s probably more relevant leaks too, I think some renders of deckard controllers got leaked at some point as well.

Supposedly they were working on an inhouse one, and then changed directions to just do software tweaks for other companies hardware instead.

It definitely needs some background process limiting, comparing official windows vs official steamOS on that Lenovo legion Go showed pretty terrible performance impact from running windows.

There were previous leaks that were covered here about it, here are two articles on it:

• https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/09/valve-appear-to-be-testing-arm64-and-android-support-for-steam-on-linux/

• https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/09/deckard-is-apparently-the-codename-for-a-possible-standalone-valve-vr-headset/

As with anything like this, it’s not 100%, but it’s pretty much confirmed that valve is working on getting x86 vr games to run for ARM hardware, which is enough for most people to assume that an ARM VR headset is coming.

I would guess steam deck 2 will be x86, I’m assuming that valve is already working on hardware for it. We do know that Valve is working on a new VR headset that will be ARM based though, and that they’re working on an ARM compatibility layer for it. If the early testing of the VR headset is promising enough I could imagine valve pivoting to make the next Deck ARM based, but that will probably cause a longer delay before we get a Deck 2.

Unfortunately common issue with a lot of Epic store games, many don’t work or have issues when compared to the steam version. The protonDB reports are all 6months+ in age as well, so it’s possible something has changed with the game in that time. Found this discussion on reddit, where it sounds like it runs for most people but with terrible performance.

I know some Epic games take a really long time at first load. The Epic version of gloomhaven could take 1-2 hours to load the first time if I recall right, but after that first really long load time it would work fine. I’m assuming it’s compiling shaders or something the first time.

For trackball, I personally find a finger controlled trackball much more intuitive and easy to use compared to a thumb controlled one. The trackpads on the deck and steam controller are great, but they generally are thumb only unless you have some really funky grip.

You can use any mouse. Also after an initial learning curve, trackball mice are a very couch friendly mouse.

It’s cool that the switch 2 has a mouse mode, but it’s not very ergonomic and it’s pretty limited in terms of comfortable inputs.

It’s distributed through flatpak, so yes, it’s available on Ubuntu or any linux distro that supports flatpak.

It is focused on controller support, so it might not be ideal for an ubuntu desktop computer, but that just depends on your use case.

According to the article this has a built in adblocker.

That can work with any website, so you can probably just install jellyfin, have your local media hosted at 127.0.0.1:8188, and play that in the picture in picture plugin.

I think it was supported really early on (or was supposed to be supported), but it hasn’t worked for basically the entire time I’ve had my Deck. I don’t play with keyboard very often so it never impacted me, but I know I’ve heard people complain about it.