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First impressions: Really good hardware for the price. They fixed the worst thing about SteamOS: It's now got an Arch base. They're definitely overcharging f

by caslon 5y ago

First impressions: Really good hardware for the price. They fixed the worst thing about SteamOS: It's now got an Arch base. They're definitely overcharging for storage, but I imagine it'll be easy enough to modify one, so it probably doesn't matter much. Why is any company having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 these days? Going with a relatively low resolution compared to modern ones is actually a surprisingly smart move, given how small the display is.

NegativeLatency 5y ago
USB 2 on a mobile device might be for limiting power consumption?
- caslon 5y ago
  Nope, it's on the dock. One USB-3, two USB-2. There's no power consumption reason for the dock.
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    Internally, it might be a single USB 3 interface routed to a hub chip that breaks out one USB 3 and dual USB 2, or maybe even three with one of them going to a GPIO controller or some other random peripheral.
- ukd1 5y ago
  USB 3/C has really fine grain power control - using "PD" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hardware#USB_Power_Delivery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hardware#USB_Power_Deliver...), it's possible to negotiate the rates pretty finely - so I don't think it's that.
  - NegativeLatency 5y ago
    I meant that there’s probably a usb 2 controller with lower power draw reqs compared to a usb 3 controller, but I now see that the ports are on the dock like others said.
  - LeifCarrotson 5y ago
    In a mobile device, it's not necessarily about the power delivered over the Vbus wire, but about the energy required for the transceiver and serdes logic in the controller. USB 1.0 "low speed" had a clock of 1.5 MHz, and USB 1.1 "full speed" is clocked at 12 MHz. You can communicate at that frequency with a microcontroller on an ancient process node on a coin cell. USB 2.0 "high speed" runs at 480 MHz. Running a processor at that frequency requires significantly more power, but is not too egregious. USB 3 is clocked at 5 GHz, which requires more power still. Just having a transceiver capable of that frequency enabled will draw a significant load from a battery, regardless of whether you're using the bus for power delivery.
- Scramblejams 5y ago
  There are a surprising number of USB devices that don't work right when plugged into USB 3. I figure it's a compatibility-driven move to support random cheap janky controllers/keyboards/mice that customers will inevitably try to use.
systemvoltage 5y ago
The best part is that you don't need to buy games if you already have a Steam library full of games.
CyberShadow 5y ago
By Arch, do you mean Arch Linux? According to https://www.game-debate.com/news/25482/valve-counts-to-3-steamos-3-0-is-inbound-codenamed-clockwerk https://www.game-debate.com/news/25482/valve-counts-to-3-ste... , it seems to be based on Debian 9.
- jvzr 5y ago
  They specifically mention Arch Linux (with KDE Plasma desktop) in the software specs SteamOS 2 was Debian-based
thorum 5y ago
One negative: With all that hardware it’s almost 3 times heavier than the Nintendo Switch, which is already near the upper limit for holding comfortable for longer play sessions. edit: On closer look that's comparing the Switch without controllers (297g) to the Steam Deck with controllers (669g). The Switch with controllers is 398g, so the Steam Deck is only ~1.7x times as heavy - though that's still a lot of extra weight to hold in your hands.
- wil421 5y ago
  That’s almost a deal breaker. My hands get tingly after playing in hand held mode for too long. Not sure if it’s the weight or ergonomics.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    Sounds like ergonomics. If it was weight based I’d expect you to experience pain or cramps near your shoulders or upper back, not your hands. Tingling in your hands sounds worryingly like RSI, I’d see a doctor about that.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    I wonder if they have lanyard loops so you can hang it around your neck like those heavy RC controllers xD
  - boringg 5y ago
    Tingly feelings in your body are almost always nerve related. Sounds like its pressure on a specific nerve thats causing this issue for you. Hopefully nothing to be alarmed about but that you are putting a strange pressure on a specific nerve.
  - The-Bus 5y ago
    Had this issue as well. I now use it as a display only and always play with a controller (tabletop mode). If I can't use a controller, I play slower games (like Civ).
  - rustyminnow 5y ago
opheliate 5y ago
What was wrong with SteamOS being based on Debian? I’ve not used SteamOS myself, but I wasn’t aware there were problems in that regard.
- Conan_Kudo 5y ago
  It's ancient and Valve had to do tons of backports to support it properly. I imagine they didn't like that very much.
  - tlamponi 5y ago
    Could just have switched to Debian Sid, which is basically the rolling release variant of Debian. That could have saved some time on tooling/packaging adaptions. Not that I dislike Arch Linux, I run both Arch Linux and Debian (Stable on servers Sid on laptop).
    - caslon 5y ago
      Sid is still far behind most rolling release distributions, and anecdotally I haven't found it more stable than any of the ones I usually use.
      - shrimp_emoji 5y ago
        This. Only rolling releases are fit for end user systems; point release is a server meme. Not only is having new stuff good from a feature and hardware-support standpoint, but, paradoxically, new software seems to have WAY less bugs than old software. (I assume this is because devs are mainly on the new versions and don't care about old versions that much.) Try using CentOS 7, with ancient, should-be-rock-solid versions of apps. Dolphin crashes every time you load into a large directory. Kate's keybinds are broken. Tmux refuses to support 256 colors. I get none of these issues on Arch or Manjaro.
      - klodolph 5y ago
        My own personal experience with Arch & Debian Sid is that Sid is noticeably more stable than Arch, long term. Maybe Valve thinks it's easier to address the stability problems on an Arch-based distribution rather than deal getting the latest versions of stuff on something Debian-based? I'm also sure that Valve's system is going to have a smaller set of software than I'd use on an Arch desktop anyway, so there's less surface area for stuff to break.
dralley 5y ago
>They fixed the worst thing about SteamOS: It's now got an Arch base. I'm a little surprised they didn't go with something like Fedora. The kernel / drivers are kept just as up-to-date as Arch but the rest of the system is a little more stable.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  Aren't up-to-date libraries fairly important for steam?
  - dralley 5y ago
    I said "a little" - Fedora is still more aggressive with updates than Ubuntu or Debian. Just slightly less than Arch. The most important libraries for Steam are things like Mesa, which Fedora updates on a rolling basis along with the kernel.
    - flatiron 5y ago
      fedora will also patch stuff from upstream to include in their distro. for better or worse arch will try to upstream the patch and if they don't like it just keep an older version around if they don't accept it
      - dralley 5y ago
        Both Fedora and Arch share that philosophy, though. There are very very few patches in Fedora compared to the Debian ecosystem - and often the only exceptions are support for features that in the process of being upstreamed, like Firefox' hardware acceleration support that was added by a Red Hat engineer.
        prg318 5y ago
        This is not always true. Fedora maintains over 100 RedHat exclusive patches for grub2 alone: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/grub2/tree/rawhide https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/grub2/tree/rawhide Some of these are pretty questionable, particularly disabling the use of "grub-install" on UEFI systems (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1917213 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1917213)
Gadiguibou 5y ago
Regarding that storage thing: in the hardware section, they specified that the storage could be expanded with a microSD [1] card which should already improve storage capacity by a lot if you wish. [1]: https://www.steamdeck.com/en/hardware https://www.steamdeck.com/en/hardware
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- klodolph 5y ago
  Micro SD is an order of magnitude slower than the NVMe option, though.
  - checkyoursudo 5y ago
    I am not sure I can tell the difference between games that load from my SSD versus my NVMe. Is there real benefit?
    - klodolph 5y ago
      So, this is actually something that is in flux right now, and the tech is shifting towards loading from storage directly into memory, like the cartridge days back in the 1990s (Nintendo 64, etc). This is in flux to the point that it's really the new games from the past year or two you'd want to test. What caused this shift is that the current generation of consoles shipped with SSDs. The PS5 and Xbox Series X/S both shipped with NVMe storage standard. Games going forward are designed with this baseline in mind. The reason this affects game technology is because it changes the tradeoffs. You always wanted assets to load quickly, since forever. The amount of time it takes to load an asset has two parts that contribute: I/O time and the CPU time spent decompressing. In the past, storage was more precious and slow, so your game would load much faster by compressing the data. NVMe users would never see worse loading times than SSD or HD users, so you'd just compress everything, and the NVMe users would see a slight benefit. Now that NVMe is a reasonable minimum requirement, you can ship a game that uses uncompressed data on disk. People with NVMe see faster load times, and people without them see slower loading times, possibly MUCH slower. When I say "uncompressed", I just mean "uncompressed, relative to the runtime representation" which may still use compression, like ASTC. The situation with the Nintendo 64 is remarkably similar to what's going on now... because the Nintendo 64 had such a fast storage system, games could "easily" load assets on the fly. The system had only 4MB of RAM, which seemed like a very severe limitation, but you could make very expansive areas in games by streaming assets from the cartridge while playing. It was fast enough that you could load some assets from the cartridge into RAM, and they would be available to render during the same frame! These are the kind of technological changes that are going to happen inside engines, now that NVMe storage is more common. I put "easily" in quotes because nothing about Nintendo 64 programming is easy.
nostromo 5y ago
> All models of Steam Deck support expanding your storage via microSD cards. Games stored on a microSD card will appear in your library instantly. This makes buying the model with limited storage a bit of a no-brainer. I'm glad Valve supports external storage.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- modeless 5y ago
  Loading times will likely be a lot better on the high storage versions due to NVMe. And PC loading times can be brutal so I think the upgrade will be very noticeable.
- AuryGlenz 5y ago
  Eh, UHS-1 is pretty slow compared to an SSD. I think for the types of games I’d want to play on it (emulation) that’d be just fine, but for some it could be a bit annoying. I think they should have gone with a faster interface though.
  - carstenhag 5y ago
    Sort of agree. I just purchased a UHS-1 microSD card, UHS-I U3 certified. And the advertisement only claims up to 100 MB/s speed, which is terrible in comparison to the SSDs you mention. But then, it cost 60€ for 512 GB, and that's way more price effective for most. At least on the Switch, loading times are not that noticeable imo.
    - throwaway2048 5y ago
      Raw speed really isn't a major factor in loading times, faster SSDs have almost no impact, almost all of the advantage is gained from better random read preformance
      - ascagnel_ 5y ago
ridiculous_fish 5y ago
Arch is a surprising choice because of their rolling release schedule. How will software updates for Steam Deck work? Will Valve just snapshot Arch at a random time, and then stabilize it?
- flatiron 5y ago
  my guess is pretty much what manjaro does. i was surprised to see its running kde. i thought they just woulda launched a steam frontend and that's that.
  - paavohtl 5y ago
    They do also have a customized Steam frontend on top of KDE.
- brink 5y ago
  Yeah, it's not that hard to hold updates back a bit.
jreese 5y ago
> Why is any company having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 these days? Almost certainly has to do with cost and PCI-E bandwidth. Mobile chips like this only have so much bandwidth, and USB3 requires more dedicated bandwidth than USB2, not to mention more complicated circuitry that drives up price. And when your expected use case is attaching keyboards and mice, which generally are USB2 only anyways, it reduces the cost and bandwidth needed to support that many ports.
- bredren 5y ago
  Presumably most people use usb for peripherals that don’t require usb3 spec. Webcams, input devices, etc.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  It's not really a mobile chip, it's a full laptop-grade Zen 2 processor.
  - jreese 5y ago
    PCIE lanes are still a function of both the CPU and the motherboard chipset. It's cheaper to build a board with fewer PCIE lanes, and cheaper to have fewer components that need said PCIE lanes.
  - caslon 5y ago
    "laptop-grade" is mobile, in CPU terms. That's why Intel marks their laptop chips with an "M" at the end.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      Yes and no. There are desktop computers with laptop chips and laptop chips are much closer to desktop than to a phone for example
      - half-kh-hacker 5y ago
        In this context, 'mobile' does not mean 'phone', it means 'portable'.
cptskippy 5y ago
> Why is any company having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 these days? Because it's cheaper to produce and easier to design for USB 2. The cpu and chipset are limiting factors as well. https://www.amd.com/en/products/chipsets-am4 https://www.amd.com/en/products/chipsets-am4 Scroll down to the table at the bottom of the page to see what AMD's chipsets can support.
phendrenad2 5y ago
I really wonder what it means to be based on Arch Linux. Are users supposed to run packman to grab the latest security fixes? Are users going to be installing apps from the AUR or whatever? Why does this thing even need a package manager at all? Or is there more to a Linux distro that I'm not getting? It seems like a distro is mostly defined by it's package manager and repository paradigm or philosophy, with Debian being the slow stodgy stable distro and Arch being bleeding-edge. Everything else they have in common (wayland, systemd, standard components that don't know or care thst they're running on Debian or Arch).
- jcelerier 5y ago
  > Are users supposed to run packman to grab the latest security fixes? there are plenty of graphical frontends for updates on Arch. Another big thing is more recent glibc and mesa for instance which can be huge for performance. Also, Arch makes it fairly easy to rebuild all packages with optimizations for a given CPU ; for instance someone recently made a test of arch built with x86_64-v3. Also there's the way packages are built (much simpler than with debian), etc.
  - phendrenad2 5y ago
    Why does valve need to use a "distro" at all? LFS exists and is trivial to throw together a custom install. You can grab whatever glibc or mesa you want. Also building a kernel with improvements for a certain CPU is dead simple out of the box with Linux. Distros make it hard, and Arch makes it "easier". As for packages, why does SteamOS need packages? They can just make one large update package that includes all library updates for the latest SteamOS version. Or are they expecting users to say "Oh I want to update just this one library"? Seems like a huge missed opportunity to make SteamOS a "stable target" that Linux devs can make games for. But if everyone is like "I want this weird glibc!" then that's impossible.
    - RealStickman_ 5y ago
      Valve probably does not want to maintain their own distro. Using Arch as a core with their own packages on top is far easier and ensures you always have the newest core components.
mehlmao 5y ago
My assumption is that the intended use of the USB 2.0 ports are mouse + keyboard.
cesarb 5y ago
> Why is any company having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 these days? I think it's not a case of "having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 slots", I think it's instead a case of "having precisely two USB-2 slots", no matter how many USB-3 slots there are. The reason for exactly two USB-2 slots is obvious: one of them is for the keyboard, the other one is for the mouse. Neither the keyboard nor the mouse need more than USB-2, so there's no reason to have the more complex USB-3 hardware for these two ports. Other than those two ports, it makes sense to have the rest of the USB ports be USB 3, which seems to be the case here, even though there's only one (the USB-C port seems to be meant to be always plugged into a charger, so it might also be USB-2 only).
- kbenson 5y ago
  I agree on the reasoning, but at the same time, they might as well have just gone with a single USB-2 port and had people buy a <$10 USB hub off Amazon or something (or offered it as a peripheral for $20). Although, you can buy a few port USB-c hub for almost the same price, and if they just had two USB-c ports it would all work just as well with the addition of a hub (since you only need to add a keyboard and mouse when stationary).
benatkin 5y ago
> Why is any company having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 these days? Most of the prospective users don't need more USB-3 ports than they have.
Pxtl 5y ago
In my experience USB-3 generates interference that messes with wireless gaming device dongles. I use a Logitech wireless headset and gamepad and they work far worse in USB-3 ports.

by caslon 5y ago

NegativeLatency 5y ago

USB 2 on a mobile device might be for limiting power consumption?

caslon 5y ago
Nope, it's on the dock. One USB-3, two USB-2. There's no power consumption reason for the dock.
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  Internally, it might be a single USB 3 interface routed to a hub chip that breaks out one USB 3 and dual USB 2, or maybe even three with one of them going to a GPIO controller or some other random peripheral.
ukd1 5y ago
USB 3/C has really fine grain power control - using "PD" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hardware#USB_Power_Delivery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hardware#USB_Power_Deliver...), it's possible to negotiate the rates pretty finely - so I don't think it's that.
- NegativeLatency 5y ago
  I meant that there’s probably a usb 2 controller with lower power draw reqs compared to a usb 3 controller, but I now see that the ports are on the dock like others said.
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  In a mobile device, it's not necessarily about the power delivered over the Vbus wire, but about the energy required for the transceiver and serdes logic in the controller. USB 1.0 "low speed" had a clock of 1.5 MHz, and USB 1.1 "full speed" is clocked at 12 MHz. You can communicate at that frequency with a microcontroller on an ancient process node on a coin cell. USB 2.0 "high speed" runs at 480 MHz. Running a processor at that frequency requires significantly more power, but is not too egregious. USB 3 is clocked at 5 GHz, which requires more power still. Just having a transceiver capable of that frequency enabled will draw a significant load from a battery, regardless of whether you're using the bus for power delivery.
Scramblejams 5y ago
There are a surprising number of USB devices that don't work right when plugged into USB 3. I figure it's a compatibility-driven move to support random cheap janky controllers/keyboards/mice that customers will inevitably try to use.

systemvoltage 5y ago

The best part is that you don't need to buy games if you already have a Steam library full of games.

CyberShadow 5y ago

By Arch, do you mean Arch Linux? According to https://www.game-debate.com/news/25482/valve-counts-to-3-steamos-3-0-is-inbound-codenamed-clockwerk https://www.game-debate.com/news/25482/valve-counts-to-3-ste... , it seems to be based on Debian 9.

jvzr 5y ago
They specifically mention Arch Linux (with KDE Plasma desktop) in the software specs SteamOS 2 was Debian-based

thorum 5y ago

One negative: With all that hardware it’s almost 3 times heavier than the Nintendo Switch, which is already near the upper limit for holding comfortable for longer play sessions. edit: On closer look that's comparing the Switch without controllers (297g) to the Steam Deck with controllers (669g). The Switch with controllers is 398g, so the Steam Deck is only ~1.7x times as heavy - though that's still a lot of extra weight to hold in your hands.

wil421 5y ago
That’s almost a deal breaker. My hands get tingly after playing in hand held mode for too long. Not sure if it’s the weight or ergonomics.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Sounds like ergonomics. If it was weight based I’d expect you to experience pain or cramps near your shoulders or upper back, not your hands. Tingling in your hands sounds worryingly like RSI, I’d see a doctor about that.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  I wonder if they have lanyard loops so you can hang it around your neck like those heavy RC controllers xD
- boringg 5y ago
  Tingly feelings in your body are almost always nerve related. Sounds like its pressure on a specific nerve thats causing this issue for you. Hopefully nothing to be alarmed about but that you are putting a strange pressure on a specific nerve.
- The-Bus 5y ago
  Had this issue as well. I now use it as a display only and always play with a controller (tabletop mode). If I can't use a controller, I play slower games (like Civ).
- rustyminnow 5y ago

opheliate 5y ago

What was wrong with SteamOS being based on Debian? I’ve not used SteamOS myself, but I wasn’t aware there were problems in that regard.

Conan_Kudo 5y ago
It's ancient and Valve had to do tons of backports to support it properly. I imagine they didn't like that very much.
- tlamponi 5y ago
  Could just have switched to Debian Sid, which is basically the rolling release variant of Debian. That could have saved some time on tooling/packaging adaptions. Not that I dislike Arch Linux, I run both Arch Linux and Debian (Stable on servers Sid on laptop).
  - caslon 5y ago
    Sid is still far behind most rolling release distributions, and anecdotally I haven't found it more stable than any of the ones I usually use.
    - shrimp_emoji 5y ago
      This. Only rolling releases are fit for end user systems; point release is a server meme. Not only is having new stuff good from a feature and hardware-support standpoint, but, paradoxically, new software seems to have WAY less bugs than old software. (I assume this is because devs are mainly on the new versions and don't care about old versions that much.) Try using CentOS 7, with ancient, should-be-rock-solid versions of apps. Dolphin crashes every time you load into a large directory. Kate's keybinds are broken. Tmux refuses to support 256 colors. I get none of these issues on Arch or Manjaro.
    - klodolph 5y ago
      My own personal experience with Arch & Debian Sid is that Sid is noticeably more stable than Arch, long term. Maybe Valve thinks it's easier to address the stability problems on an Arch-based distribution rather than deal getting the latest versions of stuff on something Debian-based? I'm also sure that Valve's system is going to have a smaller set of software than I'd use on an Arch desktop anyway, so there's less surface area for stuff to break.

dralley 5y ago

>They fixed the worst thing about SteamOS: It's now got an Arch base. I'm a little surprised they didn't go with something like Fedora. The kernel / drivers are kept just as up-to-date as Arch but the rest of the system is a little more stable.

boomboomsubban 5y ago
Aren't up-to-date libraries fairly important for steam?
- dralley 5y ago
  I said "a little" - Fedora is still more aggressive with updates than Ubuntu or Debian. Just slightly less than Arch. The most important libraries for Steam are things like Mesa, which Fedora updates on a rolling basis along with the kernel.
  - flatiron 5y ago
    fedora will also patch stuff from upstream to include in their distro. for better or worse arch will try to upstream the patch and if they don't like it just keep an older version around if they don't accept it
    - dralley 5y ago
      Both Fedora and Arch share that philosophy, though. There are very very few patches in Fedora compared to the Debian ecosystem - and often the only exceptions are support for features that in the process of being upstreamed, like Firefox' hardware acceleration support that was added by a Red Hat engineer.
      - prg318 5y ago
        This is not always true. Fedora maintains over 100 RedHat exclusive patches for grub2 alone: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/grub2/tree/rawhide https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/grub2/tree/rawhide Some of these are pretty questionable, particularly disabling the use of "grub-install" on UEFI systems (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1917213 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1917213)

Gadiguibou 5y ago

Regarding that storage thing: in the hardware section, they specified that the storage could be expanded with a microSD [1] card which should already improve storage capacity by a lot if you wish. [1]: https://www.steamdeck.com/en/hardware https://www.steamdeck.com/en/hardware

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
klodolph 5y ago
Micro SD is an order of magnitude slower than the NVMe option, though.
- checkyoursudo 5y ago
  I am not sure I can tell the difference between games that load from my SSD versus my NVMe. Is there real benefit?
  - klodolph 5y ago
    So, this is actually something that is in flux right now, and the tech is shifting towards loading from storage directly into memory, like the cartridge days back in the 1990s (Nintendo 64, etc). This is in flux to the point that it's really the new games from the past year or two you'd want to test. What caused this shift is that the current generation of consoles shipped with SSDs. The PS5 and Xbox Series X/S both shipped with NVMe storage standard. Games going forward are designed with this baseline in mind. The reason this affects game technology is because it changes the tradeoffs. You always wanted assets to load quickly, since forever. The amount of time it takes to load an asset has two parts that contribute: I/O time and the CPU time spent decompressing. In the past, storage was more precious and slow, so your game would load much faster by compressing the data. NVMe users would never see worse loading times than SSD or HD users, so you'd just compress everything, and the NVMe users would see a slight benefit. Now that NVMe is a reasonable minimum requirement, you can ship a game that uses uncompressed data on disk. People with NVMe see faster load times, and people without them see slower loading times, possibly MUCH slower. When I say "uncompressed", I just mean "uncompressed, relative to the runtime representation" which may still use compression, like ASTC. The situation with the Nintendo 64 is remarkably similar to what's going on now... because the Nintendo 64 had such a fast storage system, games could "easily" load assets on the fly. The system had only 4MB of RAM, which seemed like a very severe limitation, but you could make very expansive areas in games by streaming assets from the cartridge while playing. It was fast enough that you could load some assets from the cartridge into RAM, and they would be available to render during the same frame! These are the kind of technological changes that are going to happen inside engines, now that NVMe storage is more common. I put "easily" in quotes because nothing about Nintendo 64 programming is easy.

nostromo 5y ago

> All models of Steam Deck support expanding your storage via microSD cards. Games stored on a microSD card will appear in your library instantly. This makes buying the model with limited storage a bit of a no-brainer. I'm glad Valve supports external storage.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
modeless 5y ago
Loading times will likely be a lot better on the high storage versions due to NVMe. And PC loading times can be brutal so I think the upgrade will be very noticeable.
AuryGlenz 5y ago
Eh, UHS-1 is pretty slow compared to an SSD. I think for the types of games I’d want to play on it (emulation) that’d be just fine, but for some it could be a bit annoying. I think they should have gone with a faster interface though.
- carstenhag 5y ago
  Sort of agree. I just purchased a UHS-1 microSD card, UHS-I U3 certified. And the advertisement only claims up to 100 MB/s speed, which is terrible in comparison to the SSDs you mention. But then, it cost 60€ for 512 GB, and that's way more price effective for most. At least on the Switch, loading times are not that noticeable imo.
  - throwaway2048 5y ago
    Raw speed really isn't a major factor in loading times, faster SSDs have almost no impact, almost all of the advantage is gained from better random read preformance
    - ascagnel_ 5y ago

ridiculous_fish 5y ago

Arch is a surprising choice because of their rolling release schedule. How will software updates for Steam Deck work? Will Valve just snapshot Arch at a random time, and then stabilize it?

flatiron 5y ago
my guess is pretty much what manjaro does. i was surprised to see its running kde. i thought they just woulda launched a steam frontend and that's that.
- paavohtl 5y ago
  They do also have a customized Steam frontend on top of KDE.
brink 5y ago
Yeah, it's not that hard to hold updates back a bit.

jreese 5y ago

> Why is any company having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 these days? Almost certainly has to do with cost and PCI-E bandwidth. Mobile chips like this only have so much bandwidth, and USB3 requires more dedicated bandwidth than USB2, not to mention more complicated circuitry that drives up price. And when your expected use case is attaching keyboards and mice, which generally are USB2 only anyways, it reduces the cost and bandwidth needed to support that many ports.

bredren 5y ago
Presumably most people use usb for peripherals that don’t require usb3 spec. Webcams, input devices, etc.
sudosysgen 5y ago
It's not really a mobile chip, it's a full laptop-grade Zen 2 processor.
- jreese 5y ago
  PCIE lanes are still a function of both the CPU and the motherboard chipset. It's cheaper to build a board with fewer PCIE lanes, and cheaper to have fewer components that need said PCIE lanes.
- caslon 5y ago
  "laptop-grade" is mobile, in CPU terms. That's why Intel marks their laptop chips with an "M" at the end.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    Yes and no. There are desktop computers with laptop chips and laptop chips are much closer to desktop than to a phone for example
    - half-kh-hacker 5y ago
      In this context, 'mobile' does not mean 'phone', it means 'portable'.

cptskippy 5y ago

> Why is any company having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 these days? Because it's cheaper to produce and easier to design for USB 2. The cpu and chipset are limiting factors as well. https://www.amd.com/en/products/chipsets-am4 https://www.amd.com/en/products/chipsets-am4 Scroll down to the table at the bottom of the page to see what AMD's chipsets can support.

phendrenad2 5y ago

I really wonder what it means to be based on Arch Linux. Are users supposed to run packman to grab the latest security fixes? Are users going to be installing apps from the AUR or whatever? Why does this thing even need a package manager at all? Or is there more to a Linux distro that I'm not getting? It seems like a distro is mostly defined by it's package manager and repository paradigm or philosophy, with Debian being the slow stodgy stable distro and Arch being bleeding-edge. Everything else they have in common (wayland, systemd, standard components that don't know or care thst they're running on Debian or Arch).

jcelerier 5y ago
> Are users supposed to run packman to grab the latest security fixes? there are plenty of graphical frontends for updates on Arch. Another big thing is more recent glibc and mesa for instance which can be huge for performance. Also, Arch makes it fairly easy to rebuild all packages with optimizations for a given CPU ; for instance someone recently made a test of arch built with x86_64-v3. Also there's the way packages are built (much simpler than with debian), etc.
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  Why does valve need to use a "distro" at all? LFS exists and is trivial to throw together a custom install. You can grab whatever glibc or mesa you want. Also building a kernel with improvements for a certain CPU is dead simple out of the box with Linux. Distros make it hard, and Arch makes it "easier". As for packages, why does SteamOS need packages? They can just make one large update package that includes all library updates for the latest SteamOS version. Or are they expecting users to say "Oh I want to update just this one library"? Seems like a huge missed opportunity to make SteamOS a "stable target" that Linux devs can make games for. But if everyone is like "I want this weird glibc!" then that's impossible.
  - RealStickman_ 5y ago
    Valve probably does not want to maintain their own distro. Using Arch as a core with their own packages on top is far easier and ensures you always have the newest core components.

mehlmao 5y ago

My assumption is that the intended use of the USB 2.0 ports are mouse + keyboard.

cesarb 5y ago

> Why is any company having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 these days? I think it's not a case of "having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 slots", I think it's instead a case of "having precisely two USB-2 slots", no matter how many USB-3 slots there are. The reason for exactly two USB-2 slots is obvious: one of them is for the keyboard, the other one is for the mouse. Neither the keyboard nor the mouse need more than USB-2, so there's no reason to have the more complex USB-3 hardware for these two ports. Other than those two ports, it makes sense to have the rest of the USB ports be USB 3, which seems to be the case here, even though there's only one (the USB-C port seems to be meant to be always plugged into a charger, so it might also be USB-2 only).

kbenson 5y ago
I agree on the reasoning, but at the same time, they might as well have just gone with a single USB-2 port and had people buy a <$10 USB hub off Amazon or something (or offered it as a peripheral for $20). Although, you can buy a few port USB-c hub for almost the same price, and if they just had two USB-c ports it would all work just as well with the addition of a hub (since you only need to add a keyboard and mouse when stationary).

benatkin 5y ago

> Why is any company having more USB-2 slots than USB-3 these days? Most of the prospective users don't need more USB-3 ports than they have.

Pxtl 5y ago

In my experience USB-3 generates interference that messes with wireless gaming device dongles. I use a Logitech wireless headset and gamepad and they work far worse in USB-3 ports.