My two main complaints with Steam deck are bad battery life during sleep mode, and that when I download games they still aren’t ready to play upon first startup, they need additional downloads/connectivity upon first launch; this should be automated upon download.
A recent steamOS update said it was laying the foundation for hibernation, which should be a more battery friendly alternative to sleep.
The second part depends on the game, some will just work. Others need to run a first launch script and install some stuff before launch, which I agree should be part of the download process. Finally some games require license check or additional network access on first launch while the game is running, and this part can't be automated by valve. Overall it's just a good habit to always run newly installed games once, at least long enough to get to the main menu.
when I download games they still aren’t ready to play upon first startup, they need additional downloads/connectivity upon first launch
This specifically bite me in the past. Despite me knowing this being an issue, I completely forgot when preparing for a longer offline session. Some games need to run once to play them in offline mode, but I believe this is not required for all games. It's not an issue with the Steam Deck specifically, but with Steam in general.
Maybe instead running the game automatically, there should be an indicator ("green dot color" and not ready as "gray dot color") that the game didn't run and is not ready for offline play (at least from side of Steam). And even further, the indicator could stay at "No Offline Play" ("red dot color") showing the game cannot be played offline. This would be a setting by the publisher to show its not possible.
A feature pretty close to this is built into Trails in the Sky (remake and original). You can set the default launch option to “Resume latest save”. When you do, hitting play on the game skips all startup logos and the main menu, just giving a quick loading screen then putting you right where you saved.
It won’t restore you to the middle of combat or a cutscene/conversation, but it makes resuming pretty flexible. It would be nice to see other games give attention to this functionality, or at least start to fight supporting technologies on the subject of launch logos.
I'm playing 2nd chapter right now, and yeah it's such a great QoL feature. It's a real shame more games don't do something similar.
I really hope that all the work that has been going into the process freeze/unfreeze functionality on Linux at some point leads to the ability to have universal save states for every game.
Would be so cool to just restore to one of the last savestates in any game, no matter how crappy the save system in the given game might be.
Sadly I don't think that's possible. Modern games are much larger and more complex than the traditional games that you could use save states in.
Not only would you need to save several gigs of RAM to disk, you also need to somehow capture the state of things like graphics cards and potentially the filesystem and other devices, none of which are trivial.
I'm fine if it works only with smaller/older/simpler games.
GPU is the reason CRIU can't do it which is a shame...
It could potentially work like save states in emulators do. Even if its only a single state like on XBOX, it would be so good if this works reliably someday.
The way how this works in XBOX Series consoles is, that each game is containerized and isolated from the OS. I'm not entirely sure how this works in detail and always assumed its kind of like a hypervisor style container. Steam doesn't do that. Steam has its own runtime and some isolation, but games and apps generally could do whatever they want on the system and they are not confined and completely isolated from the OS like a XBOX game is.
I actually wouldn't mind if one day Steam runs each game (or its an option) in a virtual environment. That would bring compatibility and security to a whole new level.
Just for the security part of it, you can isolate steam games from your file system. Some people prefer flatpak steam on regular linux because you can easily block it's access to system/user files and only let it access steam files and library directories.
For steamOS, you can create a fake home folder and add a bwrap command to the launch options, which will set system files as read only and only let it have direct access to the fake home folder.
Yeah I guess Flatpak could help here. But I always read there can be issues with some games, due to the double isolation from WINE / Proton layer too. I thought about installing Flatpak version instead, but to be honest, it's not a real issue in my opinion that warrants this (at the moment).
As for the SteamOS fake home folder, interesting method. Is this command active in the Steam game parameters (commandline call)? So that when closing the game then everything is normal. Sounds pretty good to me. For the read only system files, aren't the system files in SteamOS read only anyway? I'm currently not really concerned with the security in SteamOS / Deck, but its good to know that there are solutions (or helpers) to that.
Edit: Actually using a Proton version is almost doing lot of this already, as the "Windows" games are routed through filesystem to use the WINE directories. It's still not completely isolated off course, but at least that part is more secure than installing Linux games natively, I think.
Yeah SteamOS is read only anyways, so you could skip the systems part of the bwrap command when using it on steamOS.
As for games inside proton, they have full access to your files mounted as a Z: drive iirc. So it's possible for them to mess with your files, if the dev prepares for it.
Ah right, forgot about that Z: drive. I actually just loaded stuff from the Z: drive (Wave Race 64 PC recomp, but using GE Proton) before making that reply, so my brain was shut off I guess.
I wonder how far pausing the process(es) can take us already, yes it does not free the RAM but Linux can simply move it into swap on it's own. Maybe similiar thing works for GPU memory?
Yeah, part of the early recommendation for using the pause games plugin was to increase your swap size to 16GB or more, to make room for running multiple games like this. Most everyone just sticks to the default ZRAM now, and even if you increase the emergency swap I don't think the system will use it until the ZRAM is maxed capacity.
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