Well for the sake of context Mineclonia is a fork of Mineclone2, which has now rebranded itself as VoxeLibre. The project was forked due to personal and design disputes. In fact the most productive developer of Mineclonia, used to be the lead dev of mcl2.

Currently VoxeLibre maintains the continuity of the original project and the community which explains its higher popularity. Mineclonia by comparison has very little presence, the discord server was set up like a couple of months ago I think.

But in terms of code, mineclonia has been the faster evolving of the two. More features, more bug fixes, and advances from voxelibre that are deemed valuable are cherry picked. In terms of specific features, I really prefer the double digging depth, and the better villages. And voxelibre has significantly shortened the attack range which I find really annoying.

Other than that, mineclonia is more commited to being a true clone of minecraft, with voxelibre going out of its way to diverge, especially after the rebrand, which might turn out to be wise if microsoft’s trademark lawyers come knocking.

Indeed you can. Personally I find the phone interface a bit too clunky, but if your phone’s hardware is up for it, it does run, and all platforms that support Minetest are compatible with each other.

Nope, you can just use these mods for the time being.
On the flip side, it’s orders of magnitude easier to write a Minetest mod, and keep it updated with later versions and compatible with other mods.

Friendly, and unsolicited reminder that the Minetest engine + its game Mineclonia (or alternatively Voxelibre) are a pretty good open source alternative as of late.
Minetest is also getting some pretty nice upgrades to its graphics lately. The upcoming release should be looking quite pretty.

If you have cloud storage available, either by a company or self-hosted, you can look into Ludusavi and OpenCloudSaves, both open source and using the same savegame path database.

Ludusavi is more mature with more features.

OpenCloudSaves aims to target better usability with the Deck specifically.

Recently finished outer wilds on the deck, and now I’m working through the dlc. If you’re hooked, you are in for a ride. My advice is don’t look at walkthroughs if you have the patience. Sometimes if you stare at the problem for long enough it might just solve itself. ;)

As much as I like to use steam streaming for how straightforward it is, this is one of the issues you’ll get for seemingly no reason. The things I can recommend is trying the separate steam link software that should be in the discover store, or keep in mind that there might be issues with hardware acceleration or with the beta client. If tinkering with these doesn’t fix it, I would also wholeheartedly recommend sunshine/moonlight. Takes some effort to set up (some extra effort if streaming from nvidia on Linux and want hardware acceleration for example) but when it works, it works wonders. Much smoother especially on WiFi.

I don’t know how statistically prevalent it is, and where you’d get it varies. Sounds great that you don’t have to deal with it either before or after.

For me initially it was around the usb port when I press down on it. Nowadays, I get it when I do a twisty motion with both hands while holding it, but I’ve had it for well over a year, and it has experienced a couple of bumpy falls in the meantime.

The standard shell on the steam deck can be a bit creaky if you put pressure on certain points. How’s the new one?

RIP

Correct, proper game mode is a Wayland session running steam big picture mode with exclusive special features baked in. That’s why I said you don’t get all the features, but you do get a mostly similar UI experience.

With the recent updates in stable, the reverse is also possible, you can run the gaming mode (big picture mode) in desktop mode. Not all features will work, but you do get most of the convenience of gaming mode navigation, with the capabilities of the desktop mode in the background.

I have to preface this with the fact when I read the announcement for the deck, as a primary linux gamer, I could not believe my eyes and felt as if whoever came up with the specifications had me specifically as the target audience, so I might be a little bit biased. With that said:

Positives:

• There are relatively very few things you can’t do if you are dedicated enough, meaning games/software you can install or devices you can plug in, etc. That comes with the domain of being a pc based on foss software, but it has almost no competition on the cheap, powerful, affordable and well supported handheld space.

• Trackpads. The fact that there are multiple pc-handhelds that have come out and continue to do so, with almost none of them including them is mind-boggling to me. They can provide tons of input types, and I’d consider most games developed for mouse/keyboard to be nearly unplayable without them.

• It’s perfect for many types of games that you may own on steam/gog/itch that you might not want to play on a desktop. For example, I would never sit on my desk to play Celelste or Ori and other platformers, but they were a delight on the deck. In effect it opened up new genres for me, given that I’d never get, for example, a switch.

• Emulation powerhouse. Given the potential to play almost everything that can be emulated, combined with the ease of installation and the possibility of cloud saves, on a handheld, makes it a one stop shop for you emulation needs.

Negatives:

On the hardware side:

• I got the noisy delta fan (which I hear may not necessarily be an issue on currently shipped devices), and it can get a bit grating if you play in a silent room.

• The device, being on the bulky side, can get tiring on my wrists in certain positions, mostly when I hold it up on the same level or above my head.

• The battery can be short for demanding games, but that’s physics for you.

On the software:

A few annoyances left and right, with minor bugs, and things misbehaving. I’ve had it for over a year now and most of my original issues have been fixed. Now we’re waiting for the long-awaited version 3.5 to fix some stuff, and to add proper language support for non-english on the desktop environment side, which I consider a pretty glaring omission.