For the mouse, I recommend G305. It’s wireless, but it lasts a truly stupid amount of time on a single AA. Just keep a spare in your bag and you will literally never have to think about charging it.

It has a fantastic sensor, and doesn’t break the bank. As long as the shape fits you, it should be good.

For keyboards, look for “tenkeyless” or even smaller. Tenkeyless can come with full size keys, while being smaller by dropping the numpad. Even smaller keyboards might drop the columns of keys with the arrow keys and home/end/page keys, the function row, or even the number row. Somewhere along the spectrum you should get down to something that’s about the size of a SteamDeck, or smaller, without making the keys you’ll actually use while gaming, smaller.

If you want to save on thickness and weight, consider LP switches. Low profile mechanical keyboards have become more available. These’ll be thinner and have shorter travel, but without going as flat as most laptops. They can be really nice, while also being way more portable than boards with full-height key switches.

I like them myself just for the ergonomics. A keyboard that lays flatter on my desk means less bending upwards and then back down in my hands and fingers when using it.

I use a G915 TKL, but that may still be a tad big next to the Deck. (And expensive)

Edit: I remember hearing good things about keychron. I don’t have personal experience so do some research, but that K3 and this K7 seem potentially ideal. They also have a bunch of other models.

It’s also what got me to finally go linux full-time.

I had tried to a couple times before, but always ran into one too many snags.

When the deck was announced I thought to myself “that can’t work with every game, can it?” as I’d attempted that myself.

But I had to see for myself, and the improvements in proton were staggering. And it’s gotten even better since! Who would have though Apex Legends, Hunt Showdown, and a bunch of other holdouts and anti-cheat games would be running on linux within a year of the deck releasing?

I’ll be waiting for a crack that circumvents this. If I get the game someday.

That sounds like exactly what I was getting

Like complete freezes followed by a reboot? Or straight to complete reboot?

I had that on my first unit, RMAd it and hasn’t happened again on the new one. I assumed it was some kind of faulty hardware component. Like the RAM or GPU.

It’s probably not worth the effort. It’s one of the more complex mods, and the screen with additional resolution comes with a bunch of drawbacks, and the anti-glare coating isn’t that big a deal.

You cannot put an OLED screen in an LCD model.

They have different internals. The screen upgrades that exist for the LCD are to swap in the anti-glare coated version, or a higher resolution.

Either way, making all the software developers who insist on messing with the kernel on windows, stop, will be a good thing.

Bottles is really just a really nice UI for managing wine/proton. If you already know what you want/need to run something, it’s a breeze to set up in bottles. And even if you don’t, trying the various tricks that exist to get something running is made easy.

I can’t say the same for lutris. It can do all the same things and even more, I just don’t like the UI/UX, at all. It can do tons, but IMO it’s not the best tool for any of it.

On bottles, the more you actually understand about how wine/proton can be configured, the more sense bottles will make.

IMO Heroic is currently the best option for managing GOG games.

I find the GUI and user experience of Lutris to be atrocious, but it does work.

Personally, I’ve liked Bottles best to set up and run anything that steam/heroic can’t manage.

Note that you can enable a setting in heroic to do that automatically. Then you just install all your gog games and heroic will make sure they show up in steam.

No.

Those features are part of the desktop environment, which doesn’t run at all in game mode.

Yeah.

There’s a youtuber who’s had a static image on the switch oled on ever since it came out. He makes a yearly check-up video showing the progress on the burn-in.

Suffice to say in normal use OLED burn-in is essentially a thing of the past. It’s only still a thing on extreme brightness TVs where the panel is pushed to the very limit in terms of how much voltage it can handle.

At dimmed brightness, downloading some games, it won’t be an issue.

My monitor is ultrawide. It’s cropping off the top and bottom, fitting it into the horizontal resolution of 1080p, which is 1920. Vertical hence ends up at 804.

Why would the line about encoding on the GPU suggest AV1 is supported? GPUs can encode using lots of codecs. Are your files AV1?

My card does support AV1, and I use it in OBS, but it also supports H264, HEVC and even older formats. In OBS you choose whatever supported encoding you like.

Steam seems to just use H264 with no option to use something newer.

I’d really like AV1 support, and a resolution setting. Right now it records my 3440x1440 ultrawide as 1920x804.

That’s nice. But I think most people literally just hook up the big screen with an actual display cable.

There were apparently several, now that I look into it. I didn’t know that.

They seem to try to mitigate other issues, like asset streaming and other general bad practices in the code of the game.

It seems there are many things wrong with how Elden Ring was coded.

I suspect most people who buy one already have another gaming device. If I’m gonna play couch co-op games, I’m just switching the video output of my desktop to the projector, not docking my deck.

Yes. But Valve didn’t do anything special. They provide pre-compiled shaders for all games on the deck and can only do so because of how directx shaders are handled on linux.

All games on linux and windows when using DX12/Vulkan must compile shaders. They should be compiled during loading screens and such, not gameplay, then cached for use later.

Elden Ring in particular, didn’t precompile shaders before gameplay, and then when it did compile them, it would discard the shaders rather than cache them. As a result the stutter would happen non-stop and never go away.

On linux, the equivalent compiled vulkan shaders are cached by VKD3D, eliminating the stutter except when a shader is used for the first time. On the deck, Valve will deliver the shaders precompiled with the game download to eliminate the need to compile them at all.

The fix of providing precompiled shaders was only possible on linux due to the use of VKD3D. And even without them, on linux the stutter would go away after a while as VKD3D will cache them even when the game doesn’t. Fromsoft had to update the game to fix it from their side on windows.

It is. In fact at launch it ran better than on high end windows PCs because linux handles directx shaders better.