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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • Tumbleweed. Rolling release with automated testing (openQA), snapper properly setup out of the box.

    Honestly the entire openSUSE ecosystem. Tumbleweed on my main PC that often has some of the latest hardware, Slowroll on my (Framework) laptop because it’s rolling but slower (monthly feature updates, only fixes in-between), and Leap for servers where stability (as in version/compatibility stability, not “it doesn’t crash” stability) is appreciated.

    openSUSE also comes in atomic flavors for those interested. And it’s European should you care.

    With all that being said, I don’t really care much about what distro I’m using. What I do with it could be replicated with pretty much any distro. For me it’s mostly just a means to an end.


  • There isn’t official pricing nor reliable sources out there so I’m going by rumors.

    With your calculation you have to keep in mind that the Switch 2 cards have to somewhat match microSD Express speeds, so a more accurate comparison would be these, but they aren’t available in 64 GB sizes.

    All I’ve heard is that they’re expensive and with the larger sizes often required for Switch 2 games it’s an even bigger problem than with Switch (1). These key cards exist for a reason. And I’d bet Nintendo takes a margin on these instead of only requiring the publisher to cover the manufacturing costs.



  • For someone owning both devices and actually trying to decide which version to get, both are decent in portable mode with the Switch 2 taking the lead in docked mode (as the Deck doesn’t increase its power limits in docked mode whatsoever). So I’d probably get the Switch 2 version if I didn’t have a desktop PC to go with my Deck, but I do, so my “docked” experience (playing on my PC) is vastly superior anyway, with the Deck getting the portable part done.

    For a technical comparison it’s kind of inaccurate I think. Yes, it’s certainly impressive that the Switch 2 can run this game in portable mode likely consuming less than 10 watts for the entire system while producing okay graphics. And it’s clear that DLSS does a lot of heavy lifting here, but:

    • The 8.9 watts figure is likely somewhat inaccurate because it’s based on approximate battery life while playing the game. Even if the game is played from 100% to 0%, there’s still inaccuracies because the specific battery likely won’t have 19.3 Wh exactly. Instead it’ll likely be a bit higher than that when brand new, and a bit lower with 100s of cycles.
    • The Switch 2 clearly consumes less power than the Deck needs to achieve “playable” framerates in Cyberpunk 2077, but that doesn’t tell us that much about the efficiency of just the SoC. I’d assume the Deck requires a little bit more juice for its OLED screen and also more for the rest of the system, for example the standard NVMe drive it uses. The “approximately 9 watts consumption” comparison they’re doing makes it look like the Switch 2 is around 3 times as efficient, but that’s not how efficiency curves work. You’re comparing the Deck at a power consumption level that’s probably the peak of Switch 2s efficiency curve.
    • Game settings are (currently?) impossible to match. Some can be matched, others are either some in-between on Switch or even “lower than low”, for example some models/geometry. I assume these changes have a large enough performance impact that CDPR thought they were worth to implement just for the Switch 2.
    • Scene-specific pixel counting wasn’t really done, so it’s not possible to say which device renders more “real” pixels (even though DLSS certainly seems to make the most out of these pixels).

    I still think the Switch 2 is very impressive in terms of performance in portable mode, certainly more than I expected when hearing about the rumored Ampere architecture and the Samsung manufacturing process.

    It also shows that something comparable to DLSS (likely FSR 4) would be hugely beneficial to PC handhelds so I hope that the Deck 2 will properly support that. Sad that AMDs Z2 series don’t, but I hope Valve is cooking another custom chip with AMD soon.
















  • Valve isn’t publicly traded, and while that doesn’t make them 100 % trustworthy, I’d certainly give them the benefit of the doubt over Microsoft. They make a shit ton of money, but they aren’t obligated to squeeze every last penny out of their customers.

    Sure, it would be nice to have 1-click installers for other launchers within Steam and then automatically list games of other launchers in the Steam library, but I don’t even think Valve is the primary blocker here.

    Steam had the ability to add external shortcuts as long as I can remember, tools like Steam ROM Manager make use of that already.

    Tim Sweeney for example always likes to cry to the press how bad monopolies are with Steam and their 30 % cut and whatnot, he doesn’t seem to grasp that part of the reason almost nobody uses Epic Games Launcher is that it quite frankly sucks. Where is your multi-platform launcher? Ah, need Heroic to do the heavy lifting for you. They could offer an official Flatpak on the Steam Deck, easily installed from the Discover store, that uses Proton for games compatibility, is usable with a controller and adds itself to Steam (and when installing games, adds them to Steam as well).

    I’m not that bothered by Valve having that kind of “grip on the market” because in my opinion they are also by far the best so I’d rather they own the biggest piece of the cake than anyone else.