Fubarberry

Valve just open sourced SteamOS manager, which among other things allows updating the BIOS. I suspect we'll see this get added into Bazzite and other Linux distros meant for the Deck, but I don't think it's been added yet.

In the meantime, the Arch Wiki claims that fwupd works fine for updating the Steam Deck bios on Arch, and I'm assuming that means it would work for Bazzite and other distros as well.

Still making my way through Clair Obscura Expedition 33. Really good game.

I installed some optimization mods, and raised the in game settings some, and got it where it's looking really good and basically always sticks at 30 fps. There are occasional dips, but I find it a pretty worthwhile tradeoff for how much better the game looks this way.

I hadn't heard of free windows for smaller screen devices, but from reading on it I think it only applies to phones/tablets/IoT devices. I'm guessing handheld PCs would be excluded from that discount.

From reading on how Windows licenses are priced before, there's also usually variable rate license pricing depending on the "power" of the device, with more powerful devices having to pay a larger OEM license fee. With handheld PCs being gaming focused devices, I would assume that means Microsoft is charging more per license than the base rate.

It's not a thing in game mode, but in desktop mode it can kinda do this already.

So you have it all sorted out now? Good to hear if so.

These are both on the Lenovo Legion Go S. The significance here is that there's both official OEM windows and official OEM steamOS for this device.

I was kinda joking, but the game still stutters and has fps drops regardless of the hardware it's run on. Digital Foundry has a pretty scathing performance review of it.

It's certainly playable on good hardware (assuming you aren't super bothered by dips), but it also performs way worse than it should at any hardware level.

I don't consider the game a good performance benchmark for any piece of hardware because it's performance is abnormally bad, and there's no hardware where it can run without issues.

It's always been weird to me that more handhelds don't use trackpads, especially when windows basically requires a mouse. As far as the first non-steam deck handheld to have dual trackpads though, that award goes to the Ayaneon Kun:

The SAG-AFTRA strike is pretty nasty for a lot of voice actors. Basically from what I understand, they're striking to try to protest AI taking over voice acting roles.

A lot of times unions help their members get jobs though companies that have a contract with the union. If the union strikes, these members are somewhat safe because nearly all of the workers for that company come through the union. However SAG-AFTRA encouraged their members to get non-union conteact jobs, and then also forced them to go on strike at those jobs. This strike has been going on for over 9 months now, and a lot of smaller voice actors are losing their jobs.

SAG-AFTRA is throwing a fit about the Darth Vader AI voice thing (when the family was fully on board and agreed to let it happen), while completely ignoring all the voice actors who have been forced out of work for 9 months by the strike and are losing their contracts.

Windows uses a lot of power just existing, so you can't get any of the windows handhelds down to a low power consumption. I remember when the Rig Ally first came out, the verge tested it using 5-8w of power on the steam deck, and using 16-22w of power on the Ally. Some of that is the hardware (the Deck has a really power efficient chip for low power games), but a lot of it is windows.

My understanding is that vulkan is generally more efficient than directX.

I'm not sure what you're saying. Proton is incredible obviously, but by itself it doesn't make games run better. Using vulkan instead of DirectX could improve performance, but presumably most of the performance gain is from not running windows in the background.

If you want something capable of running at an actually steady frame rate I'm not sure any computer can accomplish that without some serious tweaking.

Also if you're wanting to play on deck you might try this guide.