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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2024

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  • The Stadia Controller and the Gullikit KK3 Series have built in batteries and therefore come with their own charging circuit.

    The Steam Controller does not charge the batteries, you have to use an external AA charger

    The 8bitdo Pro 2 comes with a rechargable battery pack that sits in the AA compartment of the controller (similar to the old xbox 360 play-and-charge kits) and can be charged via USB. I don’t know if that charge function is limited to their battery pack, or if it will work with AA rechargables as well. My guess is, though, that it doesn’t, because it would have to somehow identify if the cells are actually rechargable, or if they are just alkaline batteries - trying to charge alkalines can be dangerous.

    Allthough persoanlly, I consider using an external AA charger a convenience.


  • I do have quite a few different controllers, all work fine on linux for me:

    • Xbox One controllers (newer models, older ones don’t support bluetooth)
    • 8bitdo SN30 Pro 2
    • Gulikit KK3 Pro
    • Steam Controller
    • Google Stadia

    The Stadia Controller is not my favourite, but it still works well. I mainly use the Gulikit and 8bitdo ones, depending on the game and wether my main input is meant to be d-pad or left joystick.
    The Steam Controller is unique, but I rarely use it.
    Bonus points for the 8bitdo Pro 2, the Steam Controller and the Xbox Controllers using AA batteries instead of relying on built in, proprietary rechargable batteries. Pair them with some good IKEA Ladda rechargables and they are awesome.





  • I don’t have any anecdotes, really. On all my cheap devices, I never really had any issues with apps getting killed by battery management. I know that sometimes, you’ll have to specifically switch off battery management for these specific apps, which can usually be done with a single action that the app generally let’s you access directly on first setup.

    But I’ve always used stock android or at least AOSP based Roms - I’ve never stuck with OEM Roms longer than the (usually) first 7 days they keep you from unlocking the bootloader. Once I can unlock the bootloader, the OEM Rom is gone.

    I do know that some OEMs have their own battery management implemented on top of androids, which is often more aggressive, and a bit more convoluted to access.










  • I bought a kindle when amazon sold them for a special price of 25 Euro. It’s a cool device for reading books, but I found their UI horrendously cluttered and filled with “suggestions” instead of focusing on the content I already have. I have since jailbroken the device and am using koreader on the device to read my ebooks transfered as epubs via calibre.

    That has the advantage that when I buy DRM-free books in epub format, I am not relying on amazon to properly convert the file to a kindle proprietary format.