I’ve had this list of print-and-play games from Randomskill (containing games that are not of Randomskill as well) bookmarked for a while, and haven’t actually tried any of them…because I don’t have a printer. I have played a few of these games in their commercial versions though, but not the free ones.

https://randomskill.games/a-comprehensive-list-of-free-print-and-play-games/

Maybe you would like to give it a try?

I came here to post Faraway as well!

Instantly brought back memories of zoning out to Knytt on my then new PC 😊

If both of the Decks connect to the same WiFi, you’d be able to play local multiplayer games just fine. Not every game will support local multiplayer though, and vice versa.

As for games: How about Divinity Original Sin 2? Plenty of tactics, but also a lot of reading. Has local co-op support, but the fights are turn based anyway so I’m sure what latency issues you had over L4D2 wouldn’t be a concern.

I quite enjoyed this write-up, OP 😊

It would work in desktop mode. All Decky plugins do, because Decky itself sets up system level hooks for the plugins. You can also access your Decky plugins by launching Steam in Big Picture Mode while in desktop mode.

But yes, the custom limiter would not trigger if the battery level crosses up past the threshold. It would continued to charge untill the stock behavior of tapering off past 90%.

It would continue to limit your charge if you were above the threshold before the Deck goes to sleep. It would also continue to “idle” the battery of you force it to idle regardless of the charge level. It’s the custom charge threshold limit that won’t trigger if the Deck goes to sleep while still under it.

I’m going to dump a walk of text trying to describe this with an example because I don’t trust my ability to explain this any better otherwise— Realistically, if you, say, set the threshold to 60%. Watch a few shows with it plugged in until it ticks up to 60% and then go about your business, letting it go to sleep, it would not continue to charge your battery. A couple of days later you might return to the Deck at 50% charge or something, even though it is plugged in. And then it would start charging again once you wake it up. Assuming you keep it awake long enough to get it to 60% again. Surely with an hour of tv a week it’ll cost under that 60% mark despite the limitations!

OR, you can just not bother with the limiter at all. Force the battery to be idle all the time. You intend to only use this Deck docked, unlike me or Stampela from the comments, you don’t need to unplug the Deck and play a few games on battery.

IIRC the stock behavior is to switch to AC at every charge level, but after 90% charging very slowly to 100 and then doing until it falls below 90 again which it would take a long time to do while still powered.

I worded that initial description pretty poorly, given the default behavior is that it always uses AC power if it’s connected to AC.

Thankfully, with that Powertools plugin you will get to see exactly what the Deck is doing in terms of power and disable even that slow charge above 90% (which I have done), or even force the battery to charge at full rates above 90, should you need to prepare for a trip or something… Give it a try.

That’s very alarming!

Thankfully, I’ve not had this issue, I can see the battery go down very slowly over the day once it stops charging while plugged in. I normally play games in the evening on the battery, and haven’t noticed any reduced capacity in the last couple of years…

Hopefully, before I get something like this I’d’ve finally built a new PC 😁

That’s a good point. I lose about 5% a from the charge limit after a whole day of the Deck being plugged in and mostly on. I suppose doing a weekly power cycle could also work.

There’s also the BIOS setting that turns the Deck on when connected to AC, just in case it does run out of battery and won’t turn on after a power outage.

The Deck can bypass the battery when plugged in. And in fact, does so by default if the battery gets above 90%; it would stop charging the battery and just draw power directly from the USB cable.

With the Decky Loader plugin Powertools you can customize this threshold. I use my Deck as my only PC for work, and have the threshold set to 70%.

For video watching, I can’t imagine having any issues! If you have the OLED model (I think), you can even get Wake on WLAN to work if you plan to store it out of view (although that does feel a bit unfortunate for the poor guy, it has such a nice screen…)

If you find yourself taking and sharing a lot of screenshots outside of Steam. Install the Shotty plugin for Decky Loader to have then organized and accessible without needing to dig into Proton prefixes.

And then, access your ~/Pictures/Screenshots folder over SFTP from your phone or some other PC for efficient shitposting!

P.S. I use Solid Explorer on Android for SFTP.

P P.S. Set up SSH as soon as you can. It’s saved me a lot of effort when I boot-looped my Deck by creating a bunch of circular symlinks 🙃

Comparatively, yes. But trying to install apps or programs on the Deck if they are not on Flathub is quite a common use-case, I find. And it’s a lot more stable and less frustrating than temporarily installing packages through Pacman!

Setup Nixpkgs. Learn Home-Manager. If anything doesn’t exist on Flathub, install it through Nixpkgs instead of disabling immutability and resorting to pacman only to have it wiped after an update. And for temporary tinkering, use nix-shell.

The determinate.systems Nix installer directly supports the Steam Deck.

I agree. All of that is very true. That’s why I am comparing it to Dwarf Fortress myself, which is similarly expensive.

Yet, the bias I feel between the two is one I cannot explain.

But I’m sure in a few days I’d consider it a Christmas gift to myself anyway and forget all about how expensive it felt at the moment :]

That does feel a tad bit expensive… Even though Dwarf Fortress is right there for comparison.

Yes, it works in gamemode. You might want to also get the Decky loader plugin that lets you control KDE Connect is enabled from gamemode though

Thanks to Nixpkgs I’ve not had to worry about programs, but I sometimes miss having quicker access to DE and driver level stuff.

Does Bazzite have KDE 6 and fresher Bluez setup on the Deck?

I also use it as a regular old PC. I work from home (design, illustration), and do all of it on a Deck plugged into a dock.

The Persona series as a whole, including the other Shin Megami games… If we count summoning them as playing them, but it’s basically pokémon isn’t it.

Fate/Grand Order also features a huge roster of mythical figures, but actual gods make a far smaller portion of them. Very few games get to feature, Ishtar, and, Quetzalcoatl, together with Shakespeare and Merlin.

Eternally thankful this isn’t a rerun of the translucent black edition. I too got my first OLED delivered last week.