Epic's Unreal Engine 5 is gaining prominence in current-gen gaming, renowned for advanced rendering tech like Lumen and Nanite. The question beacons. Can Unreal Engine 5 find a home on Valve's Steam Deck, a Linux-powered handheld device? Early 2024 reveals a range of UE5 titles on Steam Deck, such

If you are like me you want to be able to adjust your logitec/steelseries/asus (among other) mouse settings within the deck itself while in desktop mode.

There's a great utility for doing this called libratbag. It can not be packaged as a flatpack so you will have to install it manually with Pacman. Due to the nature of how the deck's os is configured, you will have to redo this every time your deck updates, but it's super simple! You will need to have set a sudo password to do this, so if you have not done that go ahead and get that out of the way.

Instructions:

Launch Konsole

sudo steamos-readonly disable sudo pacman -S libratbag sudo pacman-key --init sudo pacman -Syy sudo pacman -S archlinux-keyring sudo pacman-key --populate archlinux sudo steamos-readonly enable

Congratulations! Libratbag is now installed!

The next step is to install a GUI to control libratbag, this program is called piper. Luckily this is a flatpack, and available in the discover app located on the toolbar while in desktop mode. Just search for piper there and install it. This process will not need to be repeated after each update. After it installs launch it and you are free to adjust your mouse's settings!

Recently at the Tokyo Game Show Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais spoke to CNBC about PC gaming and Steam Deck, here's what was said during the interview.

• When talking about the power of SteamOS - "we would like to work with other hardware manufacturers, so they can adopt SteamOS in the future".
• On VR: "for Steam Deck we don't really have a VR story to it, but it's definitely something we want to explore more in the future".
• For the future: "we're not really seeing growth stop after COVID, so for us it's really important to keep working on the current version of the Steam Deck, put together software updates we just released a big SteamOS 3.5 update that's added new features we're going to keep doing that - but also work on the hardware side supply chain, retail presence, work with distributors to get the Deck available worldwide and expand its audience so we're going to be focusing on that short term - in the future we're looking at the PC market and where technology is going and see if there's any interesting opportunities there".
• When asked about console cycles, games being higher-end and Steam Deck upgrades: "right now we're looking at this performance target that we have as a stable target for a couple years, we think that it's a pretty sweet spot in terms of being able to play all the experiences from this new generation and so far the new releases coming out have been great experiences on Steam Deck. We're working with developers on future releases and we're monitoring the feedback there but so far it's been pretty good on the horsepower front".

Twitter Thread

Even though Valve only just recently put SteamOS 3.5 into preview for Steam Deck, they're not done with improvements elsewhere with a new Beta Client release doing a bit of a Gyro overhaul to the Mouse mode.

Patch Notes

All three Steam Deck models have joined Steam's 20th Anniversary sale, marking the third time Valve's handheld PCs have gone on sale—the first was back in March, and the second during the Steam Summer Sale a few months ago.

It's the same discount as last time: 20% off the 512GB version, which brings it to $519.20 ($129.80 off). That's the same price as one of Valve's certified refurbished 512GB Steam Decks, which are sold out at the moment. The 256GB and 64GB versions have received smaller 15% and 10% discounts for this sale, respectively.

Steamdeck page on Steam

Display

• The default color rendering for Steam Deck has been adjusted to emulate the sRGB color gamut, resulting in a slightly warmer and more vibrant color appearance.
• Added Settings -> Adjust Display Colors, to tune the display's Color Vibrancy and Color Temperature. The settings can be tuned with a preview of a test image (above), or with your running game.
• Native: The native display color appearance (the color rendering for Steam Deck prior to this update).
• sRGB: Emulate the sRGB primaries, in a smooth manner that does not introduce gradient clipping.
• Boosted: Emulate a wider-gamut display appearance, resulting in increased apparent vibrance. May result in gradient clipping.
• HDR can now be enabled in Display Settings if supported by the external display.
• VRR can now be enabled in Display Settings if supported by the USB-C adapter.
• Reworked Quick-Access scaling settings to separate scaling from filtering. Added Stretch and Zoom scaling as new options to handle different aspect ratios.
• Fixed touchscreen orientation while external display is connected.
• Compositing is now avoided in additional scenarios, reducing latency and stutter in situation with multiple overlays on screen.
• Improved latency in certain situations where the application renders slower than the display's refresh rate.

General

• Fixed an issue where certain workloads would exhibit severe CPU performance issues unless SMT was manually disabled.
• External storage devices are now auto-mounted when connected to Steam Deck. To format or manage storage devices use the new device management interface in Settings->Storage.
• Updated graphics drivers, with many performance and functionality improvements. Improved performance for Starfield. Fixed viewmodel corruption in Amnesia: The Bunker and launch failures for Immortals of Aveum and Kaiju-A-GoGo.
• Improved Bluetooth connection stability, especially with multiple controllers
• Slightly improved sleep resume speed
• Implemented switching between controller bindings and mouse/keyboard desktop bindings by long-pressing Options in the Linux hid-steam driver, to match Steam's default Desktop configuration.
• Improved fade transitions between applications.
• The contents of the performance overlay can now be customized by creating a ~/.config/MangoHud/presets.conf configuration file.
• Fixed a bug where some games could appear stretched if their window size didn't match their swapchain size (eg. Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Storm 4)
• Fixed Disgaea PC needing to be tapped on before input works
• Fixed physical dimensions reported to games, fixing some issues with an incorrect aspect ratio sometimes being detected (eg. Returnal)
• Worked around a problem where Allow Tearing could cause heavy stuttering if the Performance Overlay or other overlays appeared on screen. Tearing is now impossible in such situations, and the Performance Overlay should be disabled for best results.
• Fixed a problem where keyboard input would not be detected in Overwatch 2
• Controller firmware: fixed an issue where some thumbstick touch sensors would lose touch periodically

Firmware 116

• Added voltage offset settings.
• Improved robustness of the Firmware Settings Reset chord (Volume Down + Quick-Access + Power) against some boot hang scenarios.
• Fixed a rare issue that would set the processor TDP limit too low causing CPU and GPU frequencies to be stuck at 400 MHz and 200 MHz respectively.
• Fixed an issue when the charging light would turn back on when plugged in for a while after fully charged.
• Updated Arch Linux Base
• This update pulls in newer performance, security and stability fixes for the underlying packages that are the foundation for SteamOS
• Most notably, this includes recent changes to KDE Plasma, Steam Deck's Desktop Mode. Full notes on these updates can be found on KDE's website here. Here are a few of the highlights:

New window tiling system

• Updated Discover (app store / software manager) with a new homepage and improved search
• Discover can now perform system updates from the desktop
• Updated desktop widgets

I live in a warmer climate and finally decided to do something about the excessive heat coming from the back of the steam deck.

This video was very helpful and maybe others might find it interesting.

Crosspost from steamdeck@sopuli.xyz