This summary (and sadly, also the GoL title) has somewhat buried the lede here: The firmware update that comes with 3.5.1 Preview adds undervolting controls — with the obvious implications of improving the battery life.
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AMD Hiring To Improve Their Linux Driver/ROCm Installation Process Across Distributions
(www.phoronix.com)
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Schenker shows off a Linux laptop prototype with Snapdragon X Elite at Computex 2024
(liliputing.com)
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AMD reveals the MI325X, a 288GB AI accelerator built to battle Nvidia's H200
(www.theregister.com)
The release notes describe changes in multi-threading, and there appears also to be changes in the graphics stack.
Note that Lawrence Yang said in March “a true next-gen Deck with a significant bump in horsepower wouldn’t be for a few years.” (https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-community-continues-to-blow-our-minds-valve-talk-the-steam-deck-one-year-on)
And a decade ago, Google itself sabotaged XMPP in their version of embrace, extend, and extinguish: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/google-abandons-open-standards-instant-messaging
You know, there are several built-in functions in phones, that are already viable methods to communicate remotely?
I had the JSAUX HB0603 and Valve’s, and JSAUX is solid. I went for Valve because of the 3×USB-A with 3.1 Gen 2/“3.2”. But the HB1201 is likely better with more 3.1 Gen 2/“3.2” ports, while HB0601 is USB 3.0 only. JSAUX tend to have a more forgiving right angle connector, while you absolutely need a extender with Valve’s to reach a Steam Deck in a case (particularly the Dbrand Killswitch). I also found Valve is better at detecting 4K resolutions in Desktop Mode, while JSAUX just goes into 1920×1080, which can be preferable (4K is very illegible). On the other hand, I absolutely did not like JSAUX HB0603 being “better” constructed out of aluminum, because it easily scratches plastic, but the HB0601 and 1201 might be different with plastic lips.
Another fairly new MMO (anticheat was fixed in January for Linux): Tom Clancy’s The Division 2. Last week tried even their permadeath mode (in-game called “Hardcore”), and survived solo levels 1–30. Steam Deck does have scary stutters due to the game sometimes needing slightly more than the 16 GB RAM, and swapping, as it could lead to fatal disconnect during fights. It is also one of those games that needs > 1 GB of swapfile.
With local models and inference like llama.cpp, I wish the modder rather spent his energy with models that are locally run, and possibly even fine-tuned to the in-game world. Instead, this mod requires a metered API that needs billing and always-on network connection, while just serving a generic language model with little in-game knowledge.
Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 runs decently on the Steam Deck, and has semi-(?)/de-facto-(?) official support (the developer purposefully switched to a Linux/Wine-compatible EAC earlier this year, and referenced the Steam Deck support in the corresponding patch note).