this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
23 points (100.0% liked)

Steam Deck

16522 readers
128 users here now

A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.

Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.

As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title

The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.

Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.

These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.

Rules:

Link to our Matrix Space

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
23
Low battery notification requrst (lemm.ee)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
13 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Is there any way to remotely get a low battery notification for my Steam Deck? I don't use it every day, and batteries don't like to sit on a charger continuously, so it might sit idle for a couple days, (relatively) slowly losing charge.

I have the Steam App on my phone, and Valve has my email address. It would be great if the Steam Deck could send out an SOS before it dies.

top 13 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

batteries don't like to sit on a charge continuously

I absolutely agree for traditional lithium ion batteries, but for lithium polymer batteries, a middle SoC is best for longevity. As far as I understand, it's better to sit at ~100 SoC than to do full discharge cycles, again unlike older battery tech which absolutely wanted full discharge cycles.

If you wanna be gentle on batteries, it's more about not rapidly charging them rather than doing charge cycles these days. So if the gameplay loop of optimizing your battery SoC is fun: do that, if not: I wouldn't bother

https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-lithium-based-batteries

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Thanks! I'll give your link a read and maybe worry a little less.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Man i almost didn't post this cuz I thought it might turn into a flame war.

Thanks for not being a stereotypical Redditor

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah at first the chill is surprising. You can even have conversation thru the comment with people you disagree with without it going full nuclear. (Their are still unaxepting people but they have a tendency to remove and redo accounts so hey if you recognize the name that probably not a troll)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Okey your link is too technical to read after a working day, I will keep it to read at workXD

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

There might be a Decky plugin that allows you to send alerts likes that.

Edit: here’s the plugins list.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I decided to Take One More Step here and go poke around the plugins. AutoSuspend seems to be the closest match, it's able to make an audible noise and send a toast. There doesn't appear to be anything that has yet been built to get a notification to a remote device.

With one slightly weird exception

KDE connect is installed by default on your deck, and has the ability to pass notifications to a connected device. It would technically be possible to permanently Bluetooth connect the deck to another device to facilitate remote notifications, but this would be expensive battery-wise and probably defeat the purpose of having the notifications in the first place

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah, I was worried about the battery drain of monitoring the battery, but I figured I'd ask in case there was a built-in solution.

Thanks for looking through the plug-ins while I was sleeping. I'll take a look at Autosuspend.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The steam deck already does limit charging to 80% after being plugged in for an extended period of time so the battery cells will still have a charge but no be in the harmful range.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

That's good to know. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

While I am not aware of any way to run custom software on the Steam Deck while it is on standby, you can drastically reduce the power drain if you shut it down fully instead of leaving it on standby. You can either use the "Power" menu after pressing the steam key, or long-press the power button to get the option to do so.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

I don't think that systemd has a whole lot of sleep-management architecture that does what you want? What it does have is the ability to do "suspend-then-hibernate", which would suspend for some set time, wake up, and flip over to hibernating. I've set that up on Debian (not too hard), Ubuntu (pure hell), haven't tried on SteamOS.

What you want is technically possible without changing the hardware or firmware, but I think it would take an unreasonable amount of systemd coding.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_and_hibernate#Changing_suspend_method

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Why don't you just shut down the Deck? Unlike suspend, there is almost no battery drain. Startup isn't that slow for it to be a chore IMO.