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Steam Deck update gets a small battery life boost with the Frame Limiter
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this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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That's not because of the software, though. The Deck has a custom APU that caps at 15W TDP. Presumably your laptop has something far more power hungry. If you cap your laptop at 15W it'll probably last longer than a Deck, assuming your battery is not damaged.
From the notes this is a change to how the controller is handled when the framerate is limited, so this probably wouldn't do much for you.
I do wonder if you can feel any additional lag at 30fps or if the polling rate was just complete overkill for that scenario, though, because 6% seems like a lot, and there are reasons why you'd want to read the controller faster than the refresh rate of the screen.
It has been my experience, which seems generally accepted online, that Linux is greatly outclassed by Windows when it comes to power efficiency on laptops during normal usage. So contributions of new ways in which power efficiency could be improved would be great.
Okay, but unless you are actively playing a game on a shoestring power budget with a wired controller this isn't even conceptually applicable. And the reason your Linux laptop is power hungry is almost definitely not that it's spending too much power making your controller responsive.
I'd argue the Deck doesn't even fix that particularly well. People keep praising its suspend functionality compared to other devices, but the truth is it isn't very power efficient on sleep. It won't turn on in your bag for mysterious reasons only known to Intel and Windows, but it also won't wake up from a month in sleep with an untouched battery the way a Switch does.
Any time I left my dock unplugged (after cleaning or whatever), next time I wanted to use the switch or joycons for something I found the battery drained :P
Not to say it isn't better, or even way better, but calling it untouched seems a bit too exaggerated.
The Switch does do stuff on sleep, so maybe it isn't the best example. Older Nintendo handhelds were bizarrely resilient, though.
Still, I've never pulled the deck from being left on sleep in its case and found it charged. Which makes sense, it's a x86 PC. All I'm saying is its sleep mode is somewhat more reliable than most Windows x86 devices, but it's not on par with ARM devices meant for mobile use from the ground up. You can only do so much at the OS level.