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Following up on my first Steam Deck post, I’ve tried some far less practical things with it now too.

Development 💻

For basic desktop app use, the Discover store will let you easily install a lot of apps, including things like VS Code, Qt Creator, Builder, and Godot. Depending on what you want to do, this might be all you need.

If you’re the type of person that’s actually reading a blog like this, you should be using the Beta branch of SteamOS. Then, make sure you know the basics of Arch Linux before you break everything 🙃

On the beta branch, the pacman repos include basically everything you’d expect in upstream Arch. For me, I’ve found a number of basic packages/steps incredibly useful:

# Allow modifying root filesystem and set up pacman:
sudo steamos-readonly disable
sudo pacman-key --init
sudo pacman-key --populate

# Install the most useful development packages:
sudo pacman -S --needed \
  base-devel git git-lfs cmake glibc go go-tools android-tools android-udev
pip3 install --user -U \
  build twine pip setuptools wheel \
  autopep8 flake8

# Enable printer/scanner support:
sudo pacman -S --needed cups print-manager skanlite sane-airscan
sudo systemctl enable --now cups.service

# Media stuff if you want to do video/audio/image-y things:
sudo pacman -S --needed \
  qt5-imageformats libwebp libheif libavif libpng12 \
  imagemagick graphicsmagick pngquant pngcrush \
  ffmpeg livba-utils handbrake-cli
pip3 install --user -U \
  Pillow piexif yt-dlp

ML 💡

Shared VRAM/system RAM makes using GPU compute impractical, but running ML models on CPU with system RAM generally works okay, if a bit slow. Definitely not what the Deck was intended for, but I’ve been surprised at how usable it actually is for running existing models. Definitely wouldn’t use the Deck for training or ML development, but as a target platform it kinda works.

• Llama 3, Deepseek R1 distills, etc. with CPU is quite usable, for any model that fits in RAM. Llama 3.2 in particular is fast enough to be useful on the Deck.
• PyTorch works semi-okay with CPU compute, I’ve used Stable Diffusion image generation with < 1MP resolutions on non-SDXL models without issues. The SD Web UI project mostly works fine out of the box, requiring minimal adjustment as long as you keep the models really small.

Dual-boot 🖥️

While the SteamOS bootloader doesn’t currently support booting multiple operating systems from the internal SSD, the Deck is very usable when booting other OSs from microSD or USB. Using a microSD install of Windows works quite well, and lets you easily and cleanly isolate the Windows and SteamOS stuff. Just remember to install the drivers for the microSD reader or you’ll have issues 😛

USB boot for basically any OS works great, especially with a dock/hub. The one thing I still want to try at some point is getting macOS running on it. I feel it’ll be a bit of a stretch to make it at all usable, especially without a dock and external peripherals, but I want to see how far it can go.

I like Pokémon. I like Minecraft. I like Animal Crossing. I like Dragon Quest Builders.

I love Pokopia.

The characters are wonderful, with both the generic Pokémon and the main characters like Professor Tangrowth and Chef Dente being well written and fun. The dynamic interactions between them feels real and fun, and makes the world feel “alive” despite being a wasteland where humans have long since disappeared. I love the dialog, the game mechanics, the sense of discovery as you explore the world… it’s all great.

Rebuilding the world is fun, with interesting new takes on traditional Pokémon tropes and mechanics. My ditto, Nadeshiko, has been super fun to customize and play with. Currently they wear a plaid shirt and a silly hat. I love how drippy/floppy the dittos look.

Cloud islands are really neat. You can create a dedicated online island that you can share the code for, so anyone can view/play there. It works much better than Animal Crossing New Horizon’s original multiplayer, since it doesn’t require any specific user to be online or “host” the island, and every player can contribute fully to it. It’s effectively a complete online private multiplayer server. Super cool!

If you have a Switch 2, you should get Pokopia. If you don’t have a Switch 2, Pokopia is a good enough reason to get one.

I tried two very different phones recently. Those who know me or follow this blog for some reason know that I’ve often gone through too many phones.

Nokia 2780

The Nokia 2780 is a KaiOS 3-based flip phone that tries to offer just enough ‘smart’ functionality without being a smartphone.

KaiOS 3 is fine as a user OS. It has everything you actually need, and very little that you don’t. It’s full of minor bugs, but you get used to them and they’re not typically too problematic. I did have issues with SMS delivery occasionally, sometimes having to wait days for new messages to show up.

The modern T9 typing is excellent, and I found that I quickly reached a usable typing speed. The predictive text and customizable dictionary are great, and I honestly kind of miss it now that I’m on a touch keyboard agian.

Since KaiOS 2 sold better, and they’re not cross-compatible, most of the community-made apps don’t work on the 2780, and you’re limited to a handful of essentials, while missing some others. For example, there’s a usable PDF reader app, but not an ePUB reader.

KaiOS 3 as a developer platform is terrible. The docs are very incomplete, the SDK relies on specific very old Ubuntu and Firefox releases, and it feels abandoned. If you want to build apps, you’re on your own.

The stereotype of Nokia’s amazing build quality is no longer a thing. Nokia is just a brand name at this point, with HMD Global buying back the name from Microsoft a decade ago. Light plastic, cheap feel, the hinge squeaks and the plastic creaks as you use it, especially noticeable while on an actual phone call. The buttons started missing presses within weeks, and had constant double presses in a few months.

Still, I really like this phone. The battery easily lasts a week. Physical buttons are great. As a “phone that is just a phone,” it works well enough. I used it as my primary phone for about two years and it was solid.

Bigme Hibreak Pro

The Bigme Hibreak Pro is an Android-based e-ink phone, with a color or black-and-white option. I got the black-and-white version in white plastic and I kinda love it. It’s the first decent e-ink phone I’ve found that actually works properly in North America, 4G/5G support is solid.

The default OOBE is bad unless you just want to read books and send text messages. Android Auto is semi-broken out of the box, and needs manual fixing due to how the OS is set up to handle variable per-app DPI and text rendering. This is a useful feature for on-device apps as most apps do not end up being very readable on the black-and-white e-ink display without heavy adjustments to their rendering. The Android Auto and Google Maps apps need manual corrections to work on the in-car display, but that leaves them mostly unusable on the actual phone since it’s an app-wide setting that overrides the normal Android system display handling. Not great but you can make it work.

MediaTek’s duraspeed aggressively kills background apps, you basically have to disable it if you want to do something as simple as have music playing while also writing a text message.

adb shell
$ settings put global setting.duraspeed.enabled 0

Once fixed, it’s genuinely nice. E-ink reduces visual noise a lot. Battery life is excellent. Feels like what e-ink phones could have been whenever I’d thought of them in the past.

Still niche, still rough, but finally not a novelty. I’d honestly recommend it to anyone. You won’t be scrolling on TikTok on it, but that’s a good thing. This will be my primary phone going forward and I’m very happy with it!

Back in 2020, I migrated this blog from Jekyll to Gatsby. Gatsby was much more flexible and feature-rich than Jekyll, but I always had concerns about the long-term maintainability of it, as it had a lot of seemingly-unnecessary complexity. Gatsby worked by transforming content sources (in my case a collection of Markdown files) into a GraphQL API, then providing a React app framework to generate pages from the GraphQL data.

Since then, Gatsby has effectively been abandoned, and many more competitors have arrived. I decided to try Astro, and the migration from Gatsby to Astro was incredibly easy. My build times are dramatically improved, and Astro is much easier to work with. I’m loving the simplicity, and the JSX-like syntax made porting my React components over effortless. Apart from some changes to browser preloading, and removal of the (already broken) Algolia search component, the end result is nearly identical to what I had with Gatsby but with far less complexity. I feel like Astro has struck the perfect balance between features and complexity, with the ability to easily extend it for more advanced use cases.

I’ll probably end up moving platforms again in a few years. It seems like that’s just what I do with this site.

The Nintendo Switch 2 is neat and kinda weird. I mostly really like it. I still haven’t gotten my invite to order one from Nintendo, but I knew someone who got several preorders so I bought from him at MSRP.

First impressions were a bit weird. I wanted to just quickly migrate my save games from my Switch 1, but apparently it requires that both consoles be plugged into first-party power adapters to start the transfer. Luckily, it only checks once when starting the process on each device, so I was able to use the Switch 2 power adapter for both devices, temporarily plugging each in only during the initial check. My other USB-C PD options were not accepted by the migration tool even when they powered and charged both devices perfectly fine. This was especially silly because the transfer only took about 5 minutes!

Once set up, it’s a Switch, but better. In docked mode, every Switch game just runs way better, and the Switch controllers generally work as expected. It’s annoying that Switch 1 controllers can’t power it on, because that’s definitely an intentional feature restriction to get people to buy new a Pro Controller, but BOTW has never looked better at 1440p 60 on my OLED TV.

In handheld, the display is noticeably larger, brighter, and more saturated than the original Switch LCD. VRR and 120 Hz support are very nice, and make a big difference in many games that struggle to keep a consistent V-Sync frame-rate. I’m hopeful that they figure out VRR support on the dock despite the DisplayPort to HDMI conversion limitations, because it’s incredibly helpful for some games.

Switch 1 games that haven’t had proper Switch 2 patches yet look pretty bad in handheld play. The 720p game resolution is resampled to the 1080p display with only basic filtering, causing every pixel to be mismatched. UIs look especially blurry, but anything with pixel-sized detail looks quite bad. Any high-contrast edge becomes blurred across pixels, and it looks noticeably worse than on Switch 1’s native 720p display. For games with 1080p support in handheld though, the Switch 2 is a huge upgrade from the original, though still falls behind the overall display quality of the Switch OLED model.

I would love to see better software features for either running the 1080p docked mode in some games while handheld, or a broader range of Switch 2 compatibility patches to run at native resolution on handheld, at least for the UI elements if nothing else. Almost every game should have > 720p UI available for docked mode on Switch 1, so it shouldn’t typically require any new assets.

The console is quite heavy and uncomfortable to hold for long periods. The Joy-Con shape is similar to the original Switch, but with the larger size and added weight (it’s even a bit bigger than the Steam Deck!), it would’ve been really nice to have something more ergonomic for the controllers. Coming from a Steam Deck, it’s far less enjoyable to hold.

The 256 GB internal storage is a great improvement from 32 GB, but I still have enough digital games to still need a microSD Express card. Luckily it seems Nintendo’s partnered Samsung 256 GB card is typically in-stock at MSRP everywhere, so they clearly planned for this. I do wish it still supported SDXC for Switch 1 games, similar to how PS4 games can be played on PS5. SDXC is much cheaper (less than half the price) for now.

I named my original Switch “Squiddy”, as I mainly got back into modern Nintendo consoles for the Splatoon series. To follow up on that, my Switch 2 is named “Ikatsu” (squid + strong). I considered に (“ni”/2) instead of つ since it’s a Switch 2, but I like the sound of いかつ more. I also considered くろうみ since it’s a black sea creature. Naming electronics is silly but fun.

Update: I got my purchase invite on July 23, well after I’ve been used to having my Switch 2 🙃