Because most people don't want that.
The quick start and stop nature is one of the biggest value adds of a handheld device.
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Steam Deck
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :-)