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?
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.
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.
My GPD Win4 handles hibernate beautifully (sleep sucks, though). I’ve left it on hibernate for weeks to a month and at most I come back to 10% less battery.
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.
Is that still an issue? My surface seems to be fine.
It depends if the hardware supports hibernation features.
Linux has typically been buggy when it comes to hibernation.
What’s broken is specific drivers and BIOS. Both are in the hands on Valve with their own device. Using 16GB for a copy of the RAM ob the 64GB model when a good chunk of capacity is already used for SteamOS, would mean that there is basically nothing left to install any games.
it could be made optional and unavailable if there is not enough space
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.
Iirc the SD does discharge from full battery a bit when plugged in for a while to preserve battery health.
It lets the battery discharge to 90% while plugged in. If you’re not using it for a few days you should still unplug.
It will still keep it above 90% all the time which is bad according to most comments I just found by googling about it, it’s just the nature of lithium batteries. Steam deck allegedly has a feature to use direct power from outlet if in use while charging and if at max, but it still keeps battery at high %.
Most of that is really old knowledge from before the days of sophisticated charge controllers.
Maintaining a high SoC is still very damaging to battery life.
Which is why the charge controller does not do it. It will drop to a sustainable voltage when it detects longer wired connection after being charged and adjusts the “percentage” it shows you accordingly so you still see a 100 to 0.
It’s worse than storing it in the ideal zone - between 3.6 and 4.0 volts (% means nothing if we’re getting technical as there is an interpretation later in software). Constantly at 4.2 is bad, dropping below 3.0 is very very bad, and going to ~2.7(iirc) is simply murder. I have a telemetry module in a rocket which doors not have a low voltage cut off and every time I’ve left it on at least one cell in the lipo is permanently damaged.
In the telemetry case, it’s designed to run absolutely a long s as possible because the cost of a (interchangeable) battery is small compared to the cost of the rocket and telemetry payload.
I’m not a battery expert, but I’ve left lipos in computers and phones on chargers for years without substantial/excessive deterioration relative to their number of charge/discharge cycles; my experience with the telemetry makes me more wary of full discharge as a cell damage condition (not a direct analog as the deck certainly shuts down before lipo cell death)
—-I should point out that I’m not terribly worried about battery damage - that’s a red herring. I’m just pissed when I grab my deck and its battery is dead and I was hoping to squeeze in a quick game. :-)
Below the 3.0 volt limit will reduce usable cycle count by 30-80% Everytime the cell drops that low. Charging over 4.1 will reduce usable cycle count as well.
Example # of usable cycles if you stop discharge at 3.2 and stop charging at 4.0 for modern lipos can be 5000-10000 cycles.
Charging to 4.3 every cycle (phone batteries are rated to 4.3 not 4.2… it’s why they have the larger than expected wh capacity numbers) will reduce that to 500.
Discharge it to 2.5 and you will get 10-50 cycles.
For those who are just looking at the SD or their phones… Most devices report 0% at 3 or 3.1v and 100% at 4.3 or 4.2 volts… So basically discharging to 0% doesn’t matter… It’s the charging to 100% that matters to most people.
If you charge to 100% you will get about 500 charges (it doesn’t matter what the % is you start at is… 90% -> 100% is the same one cycle as 20% -> 100%). That’s about two years of use for most people before your battery starts to suffer and you will see noticable decrease in battery life.
If you charge to 70% you will get about 10 years before you will see a drop in battery life. 80% will get you about 6-8 years.
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Where, if I might ask? I looked under every setting in the UI and couldn’t find it. Is it somewhere in the bowels if desktop mode? I only use the deck as an appliance, like a switch. Maybe it would be better to wipe and install windows?
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There’s an option to automatically shutdown when battery drops to X%
Where do I find it? I’ve gone all through the settings and the developer settings, is it in desktop mode?
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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.
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.
Most likely because of the 64gb model which would be deprived of even more storage and all models are supposed to have the same feature set.
I asked this question long ago. And started turning off the deck every time to stop the battery drain.
But basically the issue is the storage space.
PC games and Steam in general have too much going on in the background for it to hibernate. If it did, you’d have to wait 30 minutes for updates, shade caches, etc. just plug it in when not in use for some time, or shut it down. It’s two clicks to power off fully.
The Steam Deck doesn’t do updates or background shader caches in the background while asleep.
I would assume you have some sort of software that is keeping the Steam Deck from hibernating because I can leave mine asleep for a week and it will still have charge.
It never suspennd to disk for me. Only suspend to ram.
