As part of my ongoing effort to reduce my dependency on US services, I just moved my photos from Google Photos to a self-hosted immich instance (which I btw can only recommend so far). You might remember from a previous TIL that I had my Steamdeck configured to push my screenshots into a custom album on Google Photos. Obviously I had to change that now as well, but sadly couldn’t use the existing rclone-based setup for it. ...
My partner just ran into an issue after updating his SteamDeck to the latest SteamOS version (3.4.x to 3.5.7). He has a dual boot setup running using rEFInd, and while that survived the OS update just fine, when he wanted to return to SteamOS after a quick stint in Windows today, he was greeted by a GRUB boot menu. Detective foosel to the rescue. Attempting to boot the SteamOS entry in grub resulted in an error like this (with another device UUID): ...
Update 2023-06-07: It turns out that these days, the by far easiest way to get Battle.net on the SteamDeck is using NonSteamLaunchers-On-Steam-Deck, as I recently saw on Gaming On Linux. I haven’t gotten a chance to try this myself yet, but it certainly looks very much straight forward, albeit not featuring individual game entries in Steam. For your quick Diablo fix, it should hopefully be just fine though. Battle.net is currently having a spring sale and I’ve been eyeing Diablo II: Resurrected for a while now, so I jumped on the chance (and while at it also got StarCraft Remastered). But given that these days I primarily game on the Steamdeck, I needed to find a way to install Battle.net on my deck and also install individual launchers for the games. ...
When Valve announced the Steamdeck back in summer of 2021, I was immediately sold. At that point my primary gaming device - despite owning a quite capable PC with enough computing and graphics power to run even the latest AAA games at a decent enough quality - was my Nintendo Switch, simply because I was not particularly happy about spending my after hours in front of the same PC that I already spend my working hours on. Sitting on the couch and playing something in handheld mode while my partner was playing something on his gaming laptop or the PS4 turned out to be an “alone time together” scenario we both enjoy very much, and was an additional reason I didn’t want to spend hours alone in front of my PC. So, when the reservations opened on July 16th 2021 at 19:00 CEST, I was prepared and spent the next 22min frantically trying and finally succeeding to reserve my spot in the EU 256GB queue. And then the waiting began. ...
I’m currently setting up some alternative game stores on my Steamdeck, specifically Emudeck for my retro collection, Heroic Launcher1 for GOG and Epic, and also itch.io. I stumbled across this Reddit post that recommended to use the itch.io Windows launcher instead of the native Linux one: Itch.io has an app, that even has linux version. But it has issues - it can only use one wine version, if you have it installed globally, it can’t even handle linux games well. It pretends to install them, and when you launch them it opens a directory with the zip file… Or it just doesn’t work after installation. Then you need to add all the games to steam, setup their images, and other stuff. There’s boilr for that, but it doesn’t find everything, and most of the indies are not in the database anyway. ...
As a follow-up to my earlier post about how to sync screenshots to Google Drive here’s how to achieve the same but with a dedicated “Steamdeck” album on Google Photos instead. Once again we are using rclone for syncing. First I created a new target gphoto by running ~/bin/rclone config again and then following these steps. Quick summary: New remote gphoto Empty application ID and secret Full access No advanced config Use web browser to authenticate I then created a new album: ...
I wanted to automatically sync the screenshots I take on my Steamdeck to some cloud, without having to manually do it for every single one in the Steamdeck’s own uploader. I came across this gist by pegasd that accomplishes this via rclone, a path monitoring systemd service and some reconfiguration in Steam. However, I had to adjust things slightly for everything to really work - I could imagine that some past Steam update changed things slightly vs when the gist was created: ...
Update from 2023-02-02 To answer the most common question I’ve gotten after publishing this right away: No, I do not plan on selling these. This is something I did for fun and out of love, I’m not interested in making money off of it, and I frankly already have my hands full enough as is without adding a custom button business to the mix as well. I’ve provided this write-up to give you an idea of how to do it yourself, and I hope you’ll enjoy it. ...