It is if you compare it to a regular controller, but from what it offers - touchpads, back buttons, hall effect sticks, gyro, full remappability etc - it’s more comparable to something like the PS5 Edge and those are almost twice the cost.

“Looks a little dated” is just a pessimistic way to say “they haven’t fucked with the ui for no reason”.
I use it exactly because it still looks like it did 20 years ago.

Most Firefox forks still have support for Mozilla account sync and the extension malware blacklist, as those are useful features to have. But they do share info with Mozilla.

It’s a warranty & legal thing. Prusa had users flash unsupported firmwares, break their electronics with bad configs and then claim warranty on them, and there are also ones available that have safety features tweaked or disabled that could end up with a fire.

You are still free to do it, the tab just a permanent way of clicking “I understand doing this voids the warranty and I’m going it on my own risk” - which you’ve basically always been agreeing to modifying the firmware anyway.

It’s using a whole bunch of Steam Deck spare parts bought from iFixit, and a few after market upgrades like hall effect sticks and an extremerate shell replacement. Buying a single trigger (just the plastic R2/L2 trigger, mind you) for $20 to fix a broken $500 Deck isn’t too bad, but trying to build an entire controller from spares is really not economically sensible.

But if you did indeed have those parts already for some reason, the rest is all rather cheap, common components. Cannibalize a Deck, and the extra cost would probably be well under $50.
…plus the $500 to buy a replacement Deck, so don’t actually do it.

If you want to make it singular like he/she/it, then make it singular.

He has a car, she has a car, they has a car.
He was friendly, she was friendly, they was friendly.
He sounds fine, she sounds fine, they sounds fine.

Notice the issue?
A singular they is an okay concept, but you then have actually allow it to be singular, in every use - a direct replacement for he/she with no other word or sentence changes necessary.

The unofficial one was leaked a month ago :p

Agreed :)

And no matter how they do it, it’s clear they need to make changes; “everything is an Xbox controller and now just works” actually was pretty nice solution 20 years ago to fix the complicated mess that was PC gamepads with DirectInput, but it is very much outdated idea today.

Thankfully it appears changes are happening that might solve the issue in the near future, and all we can really do is wait and see.

They could expand the Xbox controller API feature set tomorrow

No, they couldn’t. There’s over 20 years of legacy hardware and software that expects Xinput data to be returned exactly in this format:

typedef struct _XINPUT_GAMEPAD {
  WORD  wButtons;
  BYTE  bLeftTrigger;
  BYTE  bRightTrigger;
  SHORT sThumbLX;
  SHORT sThumbLY;
  SHORT sThumbRX;
  SHORT sThumbRY;
} XINPUT_GAMEPAD, *PXINPUT_GAMEPAD;

Changing any of that would break every single xinput controller and game made in the last 20 years. Modifications require a new API, which is exactly what GameInput is.

Researching this a bit more, there is an answer in the making already - GameInput. How long that will take to take over from every game using xinput is left to be seen.

Used Pebble is one option.
If you can handle soldering in a battery, you can usually buy a Pebble or Pebble Steel for really cheap (just make sure it isn’t a first batch glued shut model). Don’t get a Round, batteries are really hard to find. Pebble 2 and Pebble 2 Duo will also need replacement side buttons, they disintegrate quickly.

Obviously they will have zero days of warranty though :p

It’s not possible as xinput doesn’t support gyroscopes, the controller simply doesn’t report that data. The “Switch” mode is setting it to be a mostly standard HID/DirectInput device so that all of those inputs can be accessed, but that requires something (Steam Input) to sit between the controller and the game to map the inputs together, and the game has to also support non-xinput controllers - otherwise you are just mapping them back to xbox inputs. The exception is a game that support directinput… well, directly. Like sim racers etc.

There is now the option of going “hardware” Steam Input as well, as is done by the HORIPAD for Steam, but it is something the controller has to do.

I’m willing to bet that without the Deck, most AAA games would have already jumped to requiring roughly PS5-level PC hardware now that last gen consoles are effectively dead.
UE5 on the Deck might not be pretty, but making it run at all on it lowers the minimum requirements of a game tremendously.

It should be an IRC clone. Having the voice and screen sharing is also kinda nice.

Instead it’s IRC + MSN messenger + Ventrilo + Skype + TeamViewer + MegaShare + Wiki + Game server hosting + Forum and probably a few more I’m forgetting, and adding more half-working bloat all the time.

It’s all about the battery temperature.
Even if you are running the deck with the APU cooking at 80C and fans blasting at full tilt, the battery stays relatively cool. But stuff it in an insulated box and start charging it at 45 watts, and the battery will quickly start heating from the inside over the recommended 30-45C maximum.

3070 Ti is still a surprisingly capable card. If you compare 3060 Ti, 4060 Ti and the 5060 ti to it, they are all really close with the 3070 Ti actually being the fastest. Gone are the days where an xx60 of a new generation was vastly faster than a 70 or even 80 of the previous one.

The major difference is VRAM, 8GB is to little little for 4k gaming, but it’s still perfectly fine at 1080 or 1440p, especially with some FSR/DLSS thrown in.

Sleep mode means ram is being powered, as otherwise it will clear out, and it keeps Bluetooth and WiFi on as well for the wakeup stuff.

There’s a rather complicated tweak for allowing hibernation, that saves stuff to disk and actually shuts the deck off properly.

All hail the Gabecube.

There actually is one under development.

And also one already on steam but it’s from a russian dev team, so…

Not really “thwart”, just poison it. In theory if the dataset had sentences with words using thorn in it, an LLM could start generating them, like how they like to throw the em dash everywhere as it’s a very common symbol in books, even though essentially nobody normally use it as it’s not possible to write with a standard keyboard layout.

Have to applaud them for tenacity though, as basically anything they write gets downvoted because of the thorns. Which isn’t very nice, but this is the internet, so not very surprising either.