• 2 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Just figured out yesterday that OpenBoard is abandoned and jumped over to Heliboard, thanks to the announcement for 1.0 in this community. The top comment mentioning FUTO Voice Input, was also a great find.
    The only annoying part is that I now have to retrain my recommendations for HB, since OB unlike HB, offers no way to extract your settings, and I found no method to access the settings files in newer Android. Thankfully, since HB offers import/export, it will be the last time.






  • As much as I like to use steam streaming for how straightforward it is, this is one of the issues you’ll get for seemingly no reason. The things I can recommend is trying the separate steam link software that should be in the discover store, or keep in mind that there might be issues with hardware acceleration or with the beta client. If tinkering with these doesn’t fix it, I would also wholeheartedly recommend sunshine/moonlight. Takes some effort to set up (some extra effort if streaming from nvidia on Linux and want hardware acceleration for example) but when it works, it works wonders. Much smoother especially on WiFi.








  • I have to preface this with the fact when I read the announcement for the deck, as a primary linux gamer, I could not believe my eyes and felt as if whoever came up with the specifications had me specifically as the target audience, so I might be a little bit biased. With that said:

    Positives:

    • There are relatively very few things you can’t do if you are dedicated enough, meaning games/software you can install or devices you can plug in, etc. That comes with the domain of being a pc based on foss software, but it has almost no competition on the cheap, powerful, affordable and well supported handheld space.

    • Trackpads. The fact that there are multiple pc-handhelds that have come out and continue to do so, with almost none of them including them is mind-boggling to me. They can provide tons of input types, and I’d consider most games developed for mouse/keyboard to be nearly unplayable without them.

    • It’s perfect for many types of games that you may own on steam/gog/itch that you might not want to play on a desktop. For example, I would never sit on my desk to play Celelste or Ori and other platformers, but they were a delight on the deck. In effect it opened up new genres for me, given that I’d never get, for example, a switch.

    • Emulation powerhouse. Given the potential to play almost everything that can be emulated, combined with the ease of installation and the possibility of cloud saves, on a handheld, makes it a one stop shop for you emulation needs.

    Negatives:

    On the hardware side:

    • I got the noisy delta fan (which I hear may not necessarily be an issue on currently shipped devices), and it can get a bit grating if you play in a silent room.

    • The device, being on the bulky side, can get tiring on my wrists in certain positions, mostly when I hold it up on the same level or above my head.

    • The battery can be short for demanding games, but that’s physics for you.

    On the software:

    A few annoyances left and right, with minor bugs, and things misbehaving. I’ve had it for over a year now and most of my original issues have been fixed. Now we’re waiting for the long-awaited version 3.5 to fix some stuff, and to add proper language support for non-english on the desktop environment side, which I consider a pretty glaring omission.