Yesterday, April 1st, Valve He launched a new update of the operating system of the Steam deckIt wasn't very big, but some performance improvements had been reported, among other things. The thing is, things don't always go as perfectly as expected. SteamOS 3.6.24 arrived alongside a Steam client that contained a couple of serious bugs, at least one of which affected the author of this article—that is, me.
When I had a moment to disconnect and have fun, I decided to restart the Mass Effect trilogy, this time the Legendary Edition. The original trilogy runs on the PS3, a console released over 18 years ago, so I was unsure how much I could limit the TDP to extend battery life. When I started the game, the TDP was set to 6. I tried to move it, and the slider disappeared. On each side, there was a 0 and it couldn't be moved, but I could deactivate it.
The Steam Deck regains the ability to limit TDP
TDP stands for Thermal Design Power. In games that don't require power, you can lower the setting and the battery will last longer. It's one of the tweaks SteamOS allows. Without that limit, games will demand what they need, and we don't always want that to be the case. Some will throw up their hands, but I played SOMA for a while at the minimum, at 3 TDP, and it worked. Not very well, but it worked. And the battery life exceeded 7 hours (I think it was up to 8). It's one of the star features and it's not an option that doesn't work.
That's why Valve has rushed to release a patch to address the problem.
Another major bug was a crash loop on startup when WiFi debugging mode is enabled. Both are now fixed with the April 2 update.
For my part, after this short note, I'm going to see if I can break free into the familiar space of the reapers.