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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • I ran Bazzite on a mini form factor pc for about 12 months. It was just connected to the TV and used to play games.

    I turned it on, I used my controller to start a game, that was it. I’m not sure what actions would be doing to break it.

    I haven’t used it in about 6 months since I got a steam deck, but I just plugged it in and tried it again. Still starts up fine, played dead cells for a few minutes.

    But if you’re looking for immutable distro for gaming then Bazzite is the gold standard.

    Other immutable distros like Kinoite, Aurora, Aeon are targeted to desktop use, but in my experience they play games just fine too, no reason they wouldn’t (Aeon used to have a weird security policy that caused problems with Wine, but I think they changed that)





  • Automatic updates are there with the right distro. Which highlights the need to look around for the right distro for the use case.

    Example being Opensuse Aeon - automatic updates - doesn’t even tell you it’s happening, just pops up “your system was updated” out of nowhere

    Automatic rollback - if an update broke something you would never know, at boot the system will pick the previous snapshot with no user intervention

    As far as the user is concerned you just have a working system; that it is the entire goal of that distro


  • I tried to find the github issue, but it’s eluding me, so I’m going to go into detail since I spent about 3 weeks troubleshooting this.

    Hard crash when playing a game. Restarts steam deck with a “verifying installation” message.

    This happens anywhere from 2-15 minutes of playtime. Game didn’t matter, Terraria, Skyrim, Borderlands 1, Dave the Diver, Shredders Revenge, Doom 2016 … It was also reported by users with both LCD and OLED decks, so hardware revision didn’t matter either.

    Anecdotally you find people saying that some of these steps work:

    Memory retraining, re-imaging steam deck, Flashing different bios versions, Messing around with gpu clocks

    But almost all of those threads loop back to the OP saying something like “nope, still crashing”. Any reprieve they did have seemed to be coincidental.

    Valve themselves recommend those first two steps and then an RMA if it doesn’t fix it.

    A Brazilian user in the issue tracker worked out you can flash BIOS 0116, and disable two specific memory power management flags. I believe the settings are hidden in other versions of the BIOS.

    A Valve rep on the tracker confirmed that would work, but suggested not to do it as the deck is not functioning properly and needs to be replaced. They then closed the issue and advised to only use that fix if you can’t RMA.

    Worth noting, 0116 is a pre-OLED BIOS, and can only be flashed to the LCD models. There is no way to reveal these BIOS flags on the OLED model, so you can only RMA in that case.

    This has absolutely solved the problem. But I think I’m having a few dodgy side effects that weren’t happening before, like updates failing, and USB connection has become iffy and needing a few restarts to recognise devices are plugged in.

    At least I can play games again, which work flawlessly now.



  • My partner bought me one a few months ago from Kogan for my birthday. But it does have a problem which needs to be RMA’d and I knew there was no hope of that.

    I thought we could try our luck with Kogan returns, but they only have the OLED model now so don’t know how that would go. Especially as it appears to work fine ( until you get 5 - 10 minutes in-game then it hard crashes).

    I found on the github issue tracker for steamOS someone from Brazil (who also had to resort to grey imports) found a way to flashback to an older BIOS and adjust memory power settings. That fixed it, but it’s a bit bodgy and introduces other issues.

    This is a known issue that the Steam rep on the issue tracker said only follow that process if you absolutely can’t RMA it. They closed the issue in the basis that you just RMA it if it happens.





  • BlueSquid0741@lemmy.sdf.orgtoLinux Gaming@lemmy.mlWhere to start?
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    1 month ago

    Depending how familiar and comfortable you are with linux, that could be right.

    Bazzite is a dependable experience that you setup it up to do a job and just use it. Tinkering around with it isn’t really a thing.

    CachyOS being basically Arch with some performance based modifications is absolutely for tinkering with, customising, learning to get under the hood with Linux… but also very breakable.




  • Absolutely. Look at Aeon. I turn it on and do what I need to do.

    Later I might see a quick pop up that says system has been updated. It didn’t require intervention. It didn’t even tell me it was happening, it just informed me after the fact.

    If anything broke, I would never know because on the next boot if something failed it just uses the previous snapshot to boot. As far as I am concerned the system is working just like it always has.

    But even as recently as this week I see people saying: immutable? No don’t make it a bad experience for them! Just recommend Ubuntu for newcomers! >:/





  • Kalpa needs to attract more developers to keep up with Aeon’s pace. I understand it is usable as a daily driver, but it’s not just a one to one mirror of Aeon with Plasma on top.

    https://sfalken.tech/posts/2024-06-08-how-do-aeon-and-kalpa-relate/

    Richard Brown is all in on Aeon along with whatever contributors are helping him. Stephen Falken appears to have no one helping him work on Kalpa unfortunately. I disagree with Richard’s stance that Kalpa shouldn’t exist, but I do wish there were some capable people able to help that project.

    I don’t mind using Gnome anyway, it actually does solve some networking issues that I’ve always had with Plasma. (Dolphin not handling it well whilst Gnome Files has no issues)