So many times I forget to plug the deck or someone uses the charging cable for something else and I come back to play the next weekend and the deck is at 0%. Why doesn’t the deck have a deep sleep or hibernate mode on by default like my laptop or iPad?
Space. The 64gb micro already has little usable space for games, and hibernate requires that you write all of the contents in RAM to disk. Rather than fracture their feature set by model options, Valve instead decided not to bother with it (just guessing).
That, and as another person said, hibernate just hasn’t enjoyed great support under Linux. There are definitely other issues that need to be fixed with the Deck, like the audio bug while docked and the need to disable half the CPU cores in order to have good emulation performance.
Because most people don’t want that.
The quick start and stop nature is one of the biggest value adds of a handheld device.
Overnight? Sure.
After 12-24 hours? Certainly it’s not good for the battery to sleep all the way to a dead-flat battery. Why not have it drop into a deeper sleep? My Win laptop goes a month and still has battery (just by walking away and letting it sleep) and wakes instantly (daily use) or a few seconds (weekly+ use). Same with my iPad. Even my Sammy tablet will go for 3+ weeks and still have juice.
It just seems weirdly 1998 era to have it so bad at power management.
(Edit- I’m not blaming you, just curious if anyone knows why it isn’t even an option)
I don’t know, last time I’ve seen that work was in 1998. My dad had an IBM and at least in the pre-installed Win 95 SE it could suspend or hibernate. Never seen anything else pull that off since then.
I don’t have a Steam Deck, so I don’t know if this would work, but Arch (and most systemd distros really) supports a suspend-then-hibernate option, so you could get it to suspend normally and then automatically hibernate after x seconds.
You could submit an issue on the SteamOS github page and perhaps Valve might include this as an option in the GUI somewhere.
Yah all good questions and good responses. Suspend is great for this handheld, but as @PlasticExistence@beehaw.org mentions linux isn’t great at suspend out of the box and having a very configurable embedded system like the steamdeck lumps it in this basket.
Linux has typically been buggy when it comes to hibernation. I wouldn’t bother, it’s not worth the risk in my opinion.
it’s not just Linux, s0 sleep is broken in Windows too.
It’s not really a risk- it stays plugged in all the time…except on the rare occasion when it doesn’t. ;-)
I’m surprised there isn’t some kind of fail-safe that starts a graceful shutdown at 10-20% if it’s been in sleep for >x hours. Taking a LiPo to 0% is terrible for the pack; most devices have some sort of fail safe against this kind of battery stress.
Isn’t keeping it plugged in all the time really bad for the battery? It should stay between 30 and 80% iirc.
