Recently had a question about a game running on the deck, and actually got me thinking since steamos settings were briefly discussed: what are the settings to change for a steam deck, or tools to add? I do not mean more fps or more performance per say only, but more battery life or just better tools for certain aspects of the deck.
No plugins, just adjust max tdp and fps limit. I haven’t felt the need for any plugins save for protontricks for old and obscure games.
This is also a good one. Do you notice any battery life changes after the tdp changes that are substantial? I never looked into it too much, but I assume there are very subtle ways to get a bit more battery without too much sacrifices
Decky loader with the protondb badge plugin was the biggest qol upgrade for me. Also heroic launcher
Decky loader is actually very interesting, thanks for sharing!
Heroic, Lutris or Bottles have to be installed to easier manage non-Steam games.
And BTRFS with compression and deduplication are great to save space.
And BTRFS with compression and deduplication are great to save space.
I’m not sure I’d go as far as replacing the file system. There’s a plethora of tools to do deduplication on ext4 as well. Albeit manually (or via cronjob).
Also, btrfs seems to be slower for random reads than ext4. At least that was the case back in 2019.
Also curious how you did this. Seems like a big job to wipe and reinstall with btrs
Ext4 can be converted to BTRFS without data loss. The only downside is that you lose ext4’s capability to have case insensitive folders.
How did you do that? Did you re-format Steam Deck?
You can use this tool to convert the deck.
The only downside I know of is that if your SteamOS install becomes corrupted (though a bug or from you messing something up), the Steam OS recovery drives won’t be able to fix it without wiping all your internal data. In comparison, with the original ext4 there’s a recovery option to only repair steamOS and leave your data intact.
This isn’t as bad as it sounds, you can still manually backup any of your important data before wiping and restoring the drive (you can access the BTRFS system from the recovery drive, and copy anything important onto a microSD or other storage device), but it’s definitely less convenient.
There’s an easy tool to do that. The beauty of ext4 is that it can be converted to BTRFS without any data loss.
Can’t remember what the tool is called and by now I don’t use SteamOS any more. But a search engine of your choice should find it.
Interesting one. I was aware of btrfs but never thought about for the deck. Heroic is on my toolbox already
