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further linux on steamdeck notes
having spent another day linuxing on the steamdeck, i have come to a number of conclusions that might be useful to you.
thing 1: huh. this is pretty good
i am astonished at how quickly the deck becomes desirable as a general purpose computing implement as soon as you put it in a dock. like, there are some ergonomics issues with it to be sure, the lack of USB ports is irritating among other things, but there's a lot of plusses.
it takes up very little footprint on a desk. “ah,” you say, “then just get a NUC” - trust me, you don't need to tell me about Little Guys, okay. but NUCs (et al) don't have built in screens, so i'm forced to have an actual dedicated monitor to use one; that's too much space investment. and they don't have batteries, which is a showstopper for me because i am constantly reconfiguring everything on my desk to do various projects. i need to be able to unplug something (either on purpose or accidentally) and move it around without needing to shut it down. the battery in the deck acts like a little UPS; perfect.
“why not get a laptop?” takes up too much desk real estate, i do not have room for a second keyboard that can't be made to go away when i don't need to use the machine at the moment. “ah,” you say, “then get a tablet.” i have a couple problems with that. one is that tablets suck; not qualifying this. all tablets feel jank and awkward to me, details unimportant. another issue though is that none of them have conventional touchpads, and touchscreens are horrible. using a desktop OS through touch is bad, full stop, so the fact that the deck has an actual touchpad is basically the seller for me.
that feature alone makes it a lot easier to use in a “progressive degradation” fashion. if i want a full-fat, 100% PC experience i can hook up a keyboard, mouse and monitor. a NUC could deliver that, but since the deck has a built in screen, if i only need a 90% PC experience i can hook up just keyboard and mouse. if i only need to go 70% PC, i can use just a mouse, and use an onscreen keyboard if i need to enter a password or ctrl+c.
all that works with a tablet too, but if i only need a 40% PC experience, i can just reach over and use the touchpad to click a couple things, without adding any peripherals at all. doing this on a tablet sucks ass, because by the nature of the act - a quick, off the cuff action before returning to my main PC - i'm always going to be off-axis, and using touchscreens with an outstretched arm makes them even less accurate than they already are. i always end up hitting shit i don't want to, focusing the wrong window, starting an unintended program, and generally wasting so much time and effort that the whole endeavor becomes pointless.
the deck hits this perfect midpoint. tablets lack just enough laptop features that i find them useless, but just including the trackpad, in a vertical orientation, got it over the line for me. i just kind of blinked and found myself wanting this thing on my desk at all times.
i have been trying for years to find a way to have a tiny dedicated linux machine, so i have something handy if i ever need to do a quick dd operation or something i can't do as easily on windows, but everything i've tried didn't take. the 12“ thinkpad (they shouldn't even make them bigger than that) was supposed to solve this, but it's just too big because of the keyboard. i have to make a bunch of space to get it out, which is never practical, and then it's In The Way the whole time it's on the desk, desperately screaming to be put back in its bag so i have elbow room again. this doesn't do that. i think it might finally be The Thing that solves this problem.
also, i know it's pretty thoroughly understood that the deck is Surprisingly Performant For What It Is, and i also know that my instincts for computer performance are pretty badly miscalibrated due to my advanced years, but i keep being impressed by what this thing can do. case in point, i installed OBS earlier, and found that it can use the hardware x264 encoding. i was able to record 1080p60 video through a USB capture card with only 8% CPU utilization and no fan noise. i didn't have a chance to test battery life thoroughly, but it felt like it'd get at least 45 minutes that way, which is a lot better than i would have expected.
thing 2: usb reliability
the usb situation on the deck is not hot, it's really its biggest failing. it should have four USB-C ports and i think valve could have made this happen if they weren't cowards. “just use a hub” doesn't solve the problem that the one port is a single point of failure.
on that note: no, you probably shouldn't run the deck off an external drive habitually. like don't get me wrong, i've done this for 8 hours with no trouble under light duty, but once i start doing Full Contact Computing it has a tendency to fall over.
three or four times i've had the USB SSD just suddenly evaporate. dmesg fills with write errors, or suddenly won't even execute because the root fs just disappeared, obviously forcing a hard reboot, and at first i thought this might be some kind of kernel bug or the SSD throwing some kind of confusing status code back to the OS or other such mumblings, but i've since obtained a dock (Anker) and connected more peripherals. this time, when the SSD disappeared, my USB capture card also reset.
in the first case I was doing a high speed file transfer and saturating a decent chunk of the bus, and in the latter i was capturing 1080p60 video while recording it to the USB SSD, so i suspect that basically, putting enough load on the Deck's USB controller has a tendency to reset it. obviously this is unhealthy if the OS is on said controller. I really wish linux was better at recovering from this specific scenario but it's not exactly a priority ig.
so i will be discontinuing my reliance on the external drive, but i can't help but think that if there were two root hubs on here, this kind of scenario would be more survivable. if valve didn't advertise the thing as a viable primary desktop PC I wouldn't even bring it up, but they do, so.
thing 3: steamos considered optional?
i've largely concluded that running steamos is not necessary unless you are specifically interested in lengthy gaming sessions on battery. like obviously that's a huge part of the sell on the deck, but not for everyone, and if that's not you, it might not be necessary.
plain old linux steam works almost identically to the steamos version. if you want the fullscreen experience on boot, you can just add it to your startup apps with the ”-gamepadui“ argument, and bam, now you'll start in Big Picture Mode. all the shortcuts work, the gamepad remapping works, the steam button works, and even if you're doing desktop stuff you can hit the steam button at any time to open steam as long as it's running in the background (you can achieve that by running it on startup with the -silent arg.)
what seems to be missing, if i'm not just missing it myself, is the top tier special sauce, the performance-tuning options available in the ellipsis menu that let you do stuff like limit FPS and force lower resolutions. guessing this worked through a mix of X server customizations and/or gamescope trickery; in any case it doesn't seem to exist outside of steamos.
thing is, i didn't find myself using those things even when playing on battery. i would rather get 25 minutes at 35fps than an hour at 18fps, and honestly i am just not that into portable gaming at all. the most likely place i'm going to use this thing As Intended is when i'm laid up in a bed (hospital or otherwise,) where i can plug it in anyway.
if you are in this same position of not actually playing games on trains and in breakrooms, and you're a tinkerer (do not waste your time with this if you aren't already linuxbrained lol,) i think you should strongly consider just wiping the internal SSD and installing Normal Linux. it's not like it's hard to go back if need be, you can just reflash it to steamos. good luck gamers
Discussion
given your distaste for jank it's surprising “linux on big gameboy” is your ideal second computer
jank is organic and human, i actually kind of love jank, as long as it's not interfering with me getting things done. i basically think of linux like a cool car.
“cool car” is synonymous with “old car”, and old cars are categorically bad: less reliable, less safe, less efficient, less featureful. i do not want to daily an AMC Eagle 4×4 - compared to a modern vehicle it's a gas guzzling deathtrap with vague steering, no airbags, a shitty stereo and at this point, probably no functioning air conditioning ever again - but it has personality. i'd therefore like to own an AMC Eagle 4×4, but to use only occasionally, and very carefully, so as to spare myself a broken neck, or at least several hours of having my bones rattled in a thinly padded seat while my ears are blown out by road noise because they hadn't invented sound insulation yet.
that's linux to me: cool, fun, useful and powerful, i wouldn't be caught dead without it, i just don't love being stuck on it. i put it on all kinds of strange little devices which i can pull out when i need to do some very specific technical task, or feel like wasting a few hours on some kind of fool's errand, as long as i have a normal machine nearby to go back to if i need to actually get something done.
the steamdeck thus typifies my ideal linux box: a weird device that's bound to have a lot of strange problems, but it's also performant and has some neat features, and it takes up so little space that it doesn't need to displace my primary machine. so since it is just a little side project, i can “enjoy” (even genuinely, sometimes) wrangling with its often-absurd, make-work problems (spent three hours getting a bluetooth gamepad working today! had to write a udev rule!) and none are bad enough to prevent it from doing the bare minimum things i actually need. which, frankly, is just “running dd”; i'm sure the deck will do that day and night.
that's kinda funny because what attracts me to old cars is the process of solving those problems. i would happily spend a weekend fitting dynamat and a decent sound system to an old plymouth valiant, and i would drive it every day. the knowledge to make them genuinely performant is out there, even on a tiny budget (a recent trend has been to shuck the engine out of winnebagos, because that's cheaper than buying a 440 on its own)
it would not be palatable to most people i think because while i know exactly how to make one safer than a modern car, a five point harness you have to adjust per person is effort in ways inertia reels and an airbag are not.
i do arch linux because it has never ever tried to force me to get a microsoft account or shown me a full screen advertisement for edge. in the same way, i am willing to recurve a distributor if it means i don't have to control my radio or heating using a touch screen
i think that the daily driven old car and the daily driven linux expect the same of you, and provide the same things. you have to be able to appraise what you don't find satisfactory, and go through a process of finding the cause and changing it. you are, for better or worse, pressed into the role of engineer. in return you have a device which is exactly as you made it, and will never do anything unexpected or be altered by someone who's goals are opposed to your own
I use Linux because XFCE lets me move and resize windows without having to grab the titlebar or edges, while also making them transparent. Very useful if you have a tiny screen or are using a laptop without an external mouse.
While I'm at it, I think that Linux-based BIOS replacements like U-Root and Tramell Hudson's Heads would make for interesting Quick Start (Gaiden) episodes, even if they don't fit with your usual subject matter.
That's funny: for me the main daily use I have for linux either at home or work is for webservice management (i.e., variations on the LAMP stack), so I'm tempted to think of Linux as a cement truck (admittedly based on a similar analogy of last-model xeon CPUs compared to, say, 13th gen core cpus). You would absolutely not be driving a cement truck to run daily errands, but it's near-obligatory to deliver specific material to people.
(Admittedly it's been a couple years since my last foray into gaming-on-linux, and maybe it's better than it was then, but it's not something that appeals to me exactly; it's more of a potential consolation option once Windows on my weird gaming rig no longer works…)