Steam Deck LCD only Improved battery life by up to 10% in light load situations Added overclocking controls
Amazing!
only? Only?? ONLY???
Edit: misunderstood the context of the sentence, but in my defense added punctuation would have helped.
I was thinking the same! That’s pretty good all things considered!
Looking at the article itself, the context is that it’s a list of things that are for the LCD only versus the OLED only.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1675200/view/4676514574283544994 Direct steam link instead of that awful site covered in ads
Thank you
Now that’s a hefty update.
Weird that they went to kernel 6.5 which is already a year old, rather than going to the LTS version 6.6 which is still in support.
At some point you have to draw the line in the sand and say this is what we’re updating to for this release, we’ll update again for the next one. I compare it to Star citizen, who kept updating to the latest and greatest and never delivered a product. I don’t care that you upgraded to the latest engine update, finish the product.
Valid, if they created this update before November 2023 when 6.6 was released, and have needed to test Steam OS with the 6.5 kernel for a whole year before releasing it.
Nope, even then, think of how much QA would go into something like this. They probably have 6-8 months of features that were built on this kernel. Upgrading the kernel before would mean needing to redo everything - all of the QA, UAT, months of prep work. Companies who hold up these big releases for us aren’t like us just clicking perform upgrade, it’s a massive process that needs signoffs and confirmations. That’s why I say they probably just drew a line in the sand and said “We can’t risk destabilizing it just to perform an upgrade” - or for all we know they did do the upgrade, realized it broke something critical, and decided against it.
We all know if they rolled out a broken release everyone would be on every forum with pitchforks calling Valve the devil. They weren’t just being idiots by not upgrading.
Always porting not-yet-upstreamed patches to new release kernels is additional work to the upstreaming work towards the latest development tree. The Valve engineers interviewed around the very first Steam Deck announcement said their goal with moving from Debian to Arch was to minimize the patchset maintenance burden. Their approach surely has that goal in mind. There are only two variants of Steam Deck with minor differences between them. If backporting patches from newer kernels is less work than forward porting their patches, they just stay with that version for a while. Updates to drivers for hardware they don’t use and filesystems they don’t use aren’t relevant to them anyway.
- Modified files in /etc are now migrated to new OS versions based on a whitelist
- Additional whitelist entries can be added via config fragments
- Up to five previous snaphots of /etc modifications will additionally be retained in /var/lib/steamos-atomupd/etc_backup/
Now, this is an interesting feature! Reminds me a bit of NixOS inspired.
Look like fedora atomic, but all /etc is preserved without the need for whitelisting
A new Dock firmware updated for compatibility fixes with VRR displays with high refresh rates
Does this mean that my games will stop “lagging” for no reason while gaming on my TV?
I really hope they actually fixed the dock display issues and blank screen problems when waking from sleep or switching displays.
I’ll dig my dock out of the closet, update it, and see what happens. Fingers crossed.
I have a 3rd party dock, but it’s worked pretty well on the 3.6 beta as far as those issues are concerned.
Oh god, me too. Fixing that and how having it connected to my TV disrupts every other device connected to it for some reason (HDMI-CEC problems maybe).
So is game recording now in stable?
No, this is an update of SteamOS while game recording is a Steam Client feature. It’s still in the beta channel.
Thanks for this, but you might have to clarify for me. If I’m using a Steam Deck (and correct me if I’m wrong here), gaming mode doesn’t use the Steam Client, right? Gaming mode is more an ‘inbuilt feature’ of SteamOS?
I was wondering if game recording would now be included, as it makes reference to it here:
Fixed a problem where a Game Recording capture failing could cause subsequent captures to also fail
The gaming mode is still the Steam Client. It’s just the big picture client which has built in additional features when used on a Steam Deck.
The stable Steam Client is still a September build, even though the whole rest of the stable OS is dated to a few days ago.
The funny part is that you can hold down the … button, and see the new overlay which has the new recording shortcuts. They do not work.
You should find this interesting
I read the update because even without being steamedeck owner, I can find interesting things 🙃
Well I was wondering why the f’n thing updated so long.
There was also a dock update… that failed… again!
… and it claims that everything is up to date. Same thing has happened every time since I got the thing.
