I wouldn’t say it runs particularly well currently. I play it at 720p lower settings and it will go 50 - 60 fps at several places and times… but then when there’s a ton of action and enemies, suddenly you’re in Jittery High 20s / Low 30s Land.

But it’s still very fun, especially with friends, and everyone picks their jobs and gets down to business. And it’s early access and early on in its road map… I imagine it’ll just get smoother as they optimize it more over time.

I haven’t noticed any increase, but I tend to use custom fan curves and play the same 5 - 10 games most of the time, so it doesn’t vary much.

Playing a lot of Jump Space and Deep Rock Galactic with friends.

Single player, Baldur’s Gate 3 continues to be my long haul game, and Brotato and Balatro remain my “20 free minutes to game” games

Day. One. Purchase.

I’m sorry friend, but I doubt you’re going to get many assisting responses here regarding this issue.

The overwhelming majority of people with a Steam Deck are running Steam OS on it, and I’d be stunned if more than a couple of dozen people on planet Earth are running your OS on one.

Add to that the fact that many, many people who play BG3 on the Deck are running the Windows version of the game under Proton (both for familiarity’s sake, and to make stuff like frame generation easier), and I don’t think that it’s just that you’re looking for a needle in a haystack… I think it’s more like you’re looking for a specific hydrogen atom inside the sun.

I don’t enjoy my current three days a week in the open office, but I’ve found that noise blocking headphones and running podcasts and YouTube videos as background noise just makes it all, for the most part, go away.

You don’t even have to go expensive with them to pull this off. I bought these off of Amazon a few months back, and they’ve been fantastic. I’d say about a 75 - 80% noise reduction, and the background stuff you play makes up the rest of that difference.

I have always had controllable lucid dreams, pretty much my whole life, but I wouldn’t call the non-control version “fake,” as the realization and knowledge that you’re dreaming is what makes it a lucid dream.

“Controllable” and “non-controllable” would be more accurate than “fake” and “real.”

Is Esperanto similar to what you’re talking about?

No, I think a true universal language is going to need minimal friction, and be as simple and vocab-limited as possible, to encourage mass adaptation.

For all its intent on being easier than other mainstream languages, Esparanto is still more complex than what I’m talking about.

I’d honestly love to see something like that become an actual universal language. Simple grammar, sub 500 words, a little more meat on the bones to eliminate some of the ambiguity, but be easy enough to teach every kid in early grade school. Something that just allows basic communication and is accessible to everyone.

Don’t think it’s going to be an evolved toki pona though, it feels like most of its fan base just wants to keep it an impractical art hobby instead of allowing it to grow up to be something useful.

Airplane 2 (1 actually had pretty common “disaster movie” plot for the time)

Your fun trivia fact for the day is that Airplane! was actually a remake of a 1950s plane disaster movie called Zero Hour! Same plot, even long stretches where they go same plot points and sometimes even shot for shot…

Airplane! just had a tonal change caused by throwing a bunch of ridiculous gags in, essentially becoming a parody of its origin movie.

If you need a YouTube rabbit hole to fill a couple of hours of dead time at some point, well, there you go.

As someone who replaced a dying laptop with a Deck, I can tell you that it’s simply this: it functions great as BOTH a handheld and a regular portable PC, both docked and not docked.

Granted, I was lucky in that I already had one of the more expensive needed extra components (a really good 1440 gaming monitor that my sister gave me after she upgraded to 4k for her rig), but I literally only had to grab a dock, a couple of cables, and a bluetooth keyboard / mouse / headphone combo, and I was good to go. Far cheaper than a new (even-low tier) laptop, and it still would have been even if I would have had to buy a monitor… and honestly, I don’t miss getting crouch-heat blasted in the least.

Also, FWIW, I don’t think the Deck is particularly good at anything that is not gaming.

Honestly, that feels like an opinion from someone who hasn’t used it in that way. It works great for non-gaming stuff, even while mobile. 800p is totally okay on a sub-8 inch screen, which isn’t too small at the distance you view it from when not docked. I also don’t have issues with needing to one-hand the Deck often, but when that happens, laps and chests exist, depending on where I’m using it, so it’s never really been a problem.

As far as desktop navigation goes, it’s great. It has a touch screen, but if you’re someone like me who doesn’t like to touch the screen and print it up, you can just make up whatever control scheme is most comfortable to you. I use the joystick instead of the touch pad, I just find it easiest.

All in all, the Deck a great experience while mobile, and isn’t anywhere near as bulky as a gaming laptop to carry around.

Literally the only thing I ever miss is the ability to easily text chat in games while docked, but most stuff I play now, I can just use the mic if I have to talk to other players.

It’s my daily driver as well, I’ve had both LCD and OLED, and native display is normally off for both when I’m docked to my monitor. Personal preference, I don’t need the small Deck screen as a second monitor 99% of the time when I’m setting five feet (1.5m) away, and I don’t like losing my mouse cursor in it.

I’m one of those weirdos. It’s my daily driver desktop PC.

I ordered mine with the same intentions as everyone else in the Great Queue of 2022 and waited patiently until it arrived in June. The week before it did, my old laptop finally kicked the bucket.

At first I intended to replace that laptop, but… I docked up the Deck and fell in love. I had already divorced Microsoft and was on Linux anyway, so it was an easy transition, and the Deck is far more capable than that old laptop was, so weirdly… it was an upgrade. More capable on daily tasks, and more portable when I had to be on the go with it. It’s been a great several years, and no regrets.

I play with a controller or the Deck controls all the time, and I actually prefer the controller UI to the M&K UI; once I got used to the way everything was laid out, and how to manipulate the wheels, it just felt like a better experience to me. To answer your original question, there are no functions or information missing from the controller UI, nor is any of it particularly difficult to get to in normal play… you just have to get used to where everything is.

They are radically different UIs though, and I wouldn’t expect everyone to like them both. If you give the controller UI a solid try and it doesn’t click for you, it’s definitely okay.

That’s great and all, but it’s locking up my Deck for quite a bit of time while it slowly and painfully downloads and patches.

My advice would be to ask a variety of adults (who you know) what they wish they knew when they were in the time period of being your age through their early 20s.

Not everything they say will be applicable to you, or will be impactful, but you’re bound to pick up a few valuable insights that might give you head starts in several areas, if you implement them while very young.

The toughest part of youth is that you can’t know what you don’t yet know, and any strong life lesson shared with you by someone else who endured the pain to get it, so that you don’t have to, is worth its weight in gold.

In a specific use case: absolutely. If you want to dock it a large percentage of the time and use it as a “PC games console,” plugged into power and hooked up to your TV / projector / monitor / whatever:

1. You’re not going to care about the built in screen as much
2. You’re not going to care about the lesser battery as much
3. The huge savings over an SD OLED will help you get over the 1 or 2 FPS you’ll lose in most games.

If you’re that person, you should definitely go for it. And even if you find yourself playing handheld more than you thought you would, it’s still not a big deal.

If they addressed the privacy nightmares that they are likely to present… by not being directly connected to the internet, by using a local and contained personal AI instance, by never being able to film anything with them without it being clearly obvious to others… then I’d be excited for that kind of tech.

But we all know that it’ll turn out to be the dystopian, corporately-connected, data-leaking version of the tech that’ll spread everywhere. So, I’m actually not really looking forward to it.

I mean, Google did this back in the day, does that count?

That’s extremely risky, a TON of people speak Spanish, including a bunch who you would assume did not by surface-level appearance. Your coworker got really lucky that they didn’t get caught and called out.