There are a ton of PC gamers who think the only way to play a video game is 1440p 60-144fps and anything below that is unplayable. The reality is the steam deck is a 720p 30fps handheld device that can occasionally make it to 60fps if pushed far enough.

IMHO a device that can run a game like God of war Ragnarok at 30fps in handheld mode and still play fine when docked is succeeding on the performance front in several aspects. In comparison, the switch version of Wolfenstein the new Colossus had to remove entire sets of geometry to even hit 30fps where the deck can hit that easily with the same settings without removing geometry and using AMD FSR. I think the deck has at least 3 more years in it before we even start to see any needed upgrades at that performance. Only time will tell.

With the recent crowdstrike nonsense and Microsoft reviewing their kernel access policies, it may be a non-issue in the future, but we just have to see what happens. I do wish valve would start really pushing these companies with kernel anticheat solutions to support proton and steam deck. It’s like they pushed for the first 6 months of the steam deck’s life and then gave up. They are really on the cusp of something truly disruptive in the pc gaming space with the steam deck, getting those last few games like cod, fortnite and valorant would really push that momentum away from Windows. Maybe they simply don’t want to pick a fight with the 1000lbs gorilla that is Microsoft, only gaben knows.

Yep, every competing product, whether it’s the rog ally or legion go had to compromise on something and it’s usually battery life, which defeats the purpose of having a handheld. I can get close to 4 hours in some games, you can’t say the same for the competition putting 1080p VRR panels with high nit values and more powerful GPUs when the SoC itself hasn’t reduced in power consumption. I just don’t see any compelling reason why valve would make an incremental product like a steam deck pro.

That’s odd, I installed the Gemini app on my 6a like a week ago. Unless you’re specifically talking about grapheneOS.

I tried bazzite, unfortunately I had some odd quirks that I can only attribute to an immutable OS. Things like window and UI scaling wasn’t consistent. My mouse cursor would blow up to twice the size when hovering over one window then shrink back down on another. I can only guess this is because the base filesystem is only readable and it can’t write any values for scaling on certain themes/window decorations. While not a huge deal, it comes off as sloppy and inconsistent. It’s not a great user experience and first impressions are everything. It’s easy to make a first impression, it’s damn near impossible to make a second one, and my first impression of an immutable OS has been soured. I installed mint 22 and it’s been a completely different experience, from window decorations, to time shift backups, system updates, Bluetooth, cinnamon theming, it just works out of the box with little to no setup.

Hal effect or GTFO

I use an Anker USB hub with power delivery and it’s completely hot swappable, I would be incredibly surprised if the official dock wasn’t.

If they upgraded to Wayland they would have to rework their streaming protocol to function with Wayland and probably several other things need to be reworked. I use plasma 6 with Wayland on my endeavor install, but I still can’t use discord streaming or steam in home streaming without problems. The x11 to Wayland video bridge by the kde devs isn’t even updated to work properly.

Honestly just shows how dialed in the steam deck is, it’s why I won’t ever buy one of their competitors.

Currently have a 6a, the fingerprint sensor was garbage when I first got it but Google really did some work to improve it over the years. It’s not perfect but it works.

Come on now, that’s not just a Google problem and you know it, no need to shit on Google for something damn near every tech company does. Google does their fair share of shitty things, this isn’t really one of them.

While I liked Niagara for what it tries to do, it’s price for a launcher was steep, and Nova IMHO is not a good company to emulate. May I ask why the need to join the Google group?

Make it open source and don’t charge for a “premium” version when it’s fully released that will hamstring your capability if you don’t pay.

Very stock Android, but they use older hardware for these phones and it shows. I had a moto g power, at one point it had to install updates and when it rebooted it sat at a blank home screen for ten minutes before showing any icons. I ditched Android altogether and went iPhone, but I heard really good things about pixel phones, so I switched back and gave my old phones to my kids.

If you’re just using it to read, I would highly recommend selling it and getting an e-ink display. I have both a Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle fire 8 plus. I just can’t read books on the fire 8 anymore, the Paperwhite is so good. If you can’t stand Amazon then rakuten makes a really good e-ink readers with their kobos.

So me not wanting to upgrade my pixel 6a to a pixel 8 because it works just fine is a problem for the global Smartphone economy? Fuck these guys. I want hardware that lasts and doesn’t end up in a landfill. I don’t give a shit if these executives can’t buy a third yacht or another tennis court in their back yard, I’m going to stick with what works. The hypocrisy of these kinds of articles is disgusting at best and immoral at worst.

Same, just started using Niagara actually, it’s really good.

Part of the issue is that the biggest smartphone manufacturers are all sister companies to each other. Oppo, OnePlus, xaiomi, they’re all different companies under the same banner, so they’re bound to share hardware specs and manufacturing.

Personally I think nothing phone is the only phone brand that’s innovating on design with the candy bar style phone, but even that’s hard to justify. Samsung has been repeating the folding phone designs and refining them year after year and Google has been pretty lazy with the pixel phones in regards to hardware.

It’s a weird time for smartphones, can’t push more power without destroying batteries, can’t really innovate with batteries because we’ve hit a wall that only software can help mitigate. Not only that’s we all apparently want bigger and bigger phones, and the only way to realistically get that is with folding display tech, which again chews up battery power.

LOL you think I’m a PCMR neckbeard? My PC is old, it’s running a Vega56, not even in the last two generations of graphics cards, I’m fine with 30FPS when it makes sense but I’m talking sub-25FPS with shit frame times that make it feel like a damn slideshow. I prefer consoles, FFS I run a steam deck docked to my TV more than I use my gaming PC. Why do you think I use GeForce Now? So I can play games on high settings and not deal with settings that make my games look like they’re running on an N64. You keep calling me a member of PCMR if you want but I’m not ever here riding Bethesda dick for a shitty game.

Starfield plays like shit, looks like shit (by today’s standards) and the quests are shit. Neon is a lazy world that only ends up becoming one giant hallway with a few shops. Everywhere else feels lifeless and boring. Starfield was a flop, and while Elex isn’t the best game out there, the fact that it can in fact in some situations stand toe to toe with Starfield on graphical fidelity is just an absolute disgrace. I was on a desert planet in Starfrield in the main story (can’t remember the name) at night, on a balcony running on GeForce Now with an RTX 2080 and getting less than 24FPS, that’s absolutely pathetic, game is just bad.