Supposed Steam Deck killers are missing the point
There are plenty of supposed Steam Deck killers available in the portable gaming space, from the Asus ROG Ally to the Lenovo Legion Go and all the Ayaneo and ONEXPLAYER devices in between. But none of them have managed to outright slay the dragon that is the mighty Steam Deck yet.
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So, modest but capable hardware, and accessible pricing, enabled by scale and software sales. The modern handheld market might have had its roots in the revival of pocket PCs, but it's by far at its strongest when it's most console-like.
This is "the point" from the article, which is that we expect a portable handheld to provide an experience like a console portable handheld would, rather than a PC in a small form factor. My two cents is that I've found the Steam Deck's "sleep" function to be very much like a console's, and it's not something that Windows does very well.
Yup. It works well enough if you know your gonna jump right back in, but god forbid you wait a couple hours it'll be dead. I've just started to turn the whole thing off every time now. I wish there was a hibernation option.
You may want to look into that... mine sleeps for a day or two at least typically.
I don't play mine every day or even every week. The last time I turned it on was last Monday. I just checked and it's exactly where I left off and at 6%. I have no idea how much battery I had when I put it into sleep mode, but it was likely full or pretty close.
They already took so much care to handle the suspend feature (they even support save syncing mid-game!). Solving the point you mentioned is the one thing that, in my view, would make it perfect.
The thing is that it's technically possible to handle this use case.. they could have programmed it so it goes into hibernation after X hours of being asleep (which could have been done by setting a wake up timer before the sleep state, the Linux kernel already allows it).
I wish some of the unofficial extensions implemented something like this, but I bet it's not so simple to hook into the pre-sleeping / post-sleeping codepath without messing up too much with the system... plus the risk of potentially causing the device to enter some inescapable loop.
