Hi everyone, we just released a large update that adds great support for almost all recent OneXPlayer devices, a bunch of new battery saving and VRR features for the Ally, and Steam Controller emulation + bug fixes for all devices.
OneXPlayer
For OneXPlayer, we are excited to announce great support for X1 (AMD), X1 Mini, OneXFly variants, and Mini Pro. It includes full RGB support, back buttons, turbo button and a lot more custom features for them such as choosing what the turbo button and keyboard button do (see here starting from 3.5.0).
We still have a long way to go and we are proud to state that OneXPlayer will be helping us on that journey. Features still missing are fan curves, battery capacity limits, and vibration intensity + some other minor issues. While we did have basic support for OneXPlayer before today, it was nothing compared to this.
ROG Ally and Ally X
It does not stop there, this is a huge update for the Ally too. Our Modern Standby patch series shipped on the new kernel as well. This series begins to untangle the modern standby bits in the Linux kernel, placing them in the place Modern Standby Windows devices such as the Ally expect and opens the possibility in the future for allowing background game downloads.
But for the purposes of this update, this re-ordering completely fixes any and all controller related issues with sleep the Ally has and allows us to finally enable Extreme Standby mode in Linux. You can find the toggle in Handheld Daemon (if you use it for TDP). Expect battery utilization to drop 4x for the Ally X and 2x for the Ally during sleep, at around 1.5% and 5% battery use per night respectively. The controller takes a bit longer to wake up when not plugged in, but I hope most of you will find that trade-off worthwhile. It should also fix the bug where the Ally gets stuck at 6W after sleep, but since that is very rare for us to get, we will wait for you to tell us.
We also fixed the frame limit slider to include all framerates from 12hz to 120hz AND to work while VRR is on or off. The frame limiter done by our contributor Matt Schwartz collaborating directly with Valve Gamescope developers. I then went ahead and fixed the VRR toggle to work alongside the framerate limiter. There is still a little bug with frame limits below 60hz + VRR that we will work next but this is a great achievement none-the-less.
Every Handheld (Steam Controller Emulation)
You might have seen that Hori released a new Steam Controller a month or so ago. Well, two weeks prior to its release, SDL got support for it and you know what that means: new Handheld Daemon emulation target. This is a very special controller, as it is the first gyro enabled controller that also has four back buttons without weird glyphs (Dualsense/Switch Pro). So, in this release it replaces the Xbox Elite controller as the jack of all trades and you can now use it to enjoy gyro without worrying about glyphs or using decky themes.
Do not worry about rumble (as the real controller does not have it), it works perfectly well.
The Xbox Elite controller remains under the Xbox controller, and the Dualsense controllers were merged into one, so you can toggle between Edge and normal with a dropdown (for reducing visual noise). So if you have profiles with either controller, do not worry they are safe (some of you were really concerned about that). The Dualsense controller is still the best, especially when it comes to emulation and advanced features such as RGB and touchpad passthrough. However, we expect most of you to switch to the Steam Controller and never look back. After extended testing, it might even become the default controller.
We also fixed 2 major controller bugs: an intermittent bug where the controller would stop working in a game after sleep, but only some times and in some games, and a bug that would cause the special buttons of devices to stop working after 40-50 sleep cycles. You have been telling us about both of these for the last 6 months, so you can take some relief in knowing that they are fixed.
Next Up: F41
This is the last update before Fedora 41. Fedora 41 plans to drop next week if there are no delays, and you know we will try to transition to it day 1.
We have started preparing for it, including by cleaning up our kernel act and transitioning into a mixed kernel tree and a kernel-ark fork that will build on Github. This should allow us to 1) give proper attribution to the patches we use, and 2) increase our kernel update frequency and contribute upstream with both bug requests and patches. What this means for you is more frequent kernel updates, more stable kernels, and no more waiting 2 weeks for that one kernel patch.
Moreover, the testing branch will transition to F41 in a few days, so unless you want to join the fun with us, we suggest you switch to stable for a bit.
And yes, there is much more cool stuff in the pipeline, including software fan curves, per-game TDP profiles, and a little patch that makes SteamUI work at 60hz without VRR, which drops battery utilization to half on both the Ally and Legion Go, and should eliminate the display flashing on VRR screens that happens due to its low refresh rate.
Sidenote: oh yeah, this is not bazzite update 3.8.0 or whatever. Moving forward, we are switching to the upstream tag format of fedora_version.date so this update is Stable (F40.20241013) since Bazzite is a continuous delivery and continuous integration (CD/CI) project in the same vein as ChromeOS. With this little PR you will also be able to see it under Build Id in the SteamUI System settings moving forward.