This may not be a revolutionary feature for me, but this addresses one of the biggest gripes I have had with the Steam Deck since release.
this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
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Hell yeah
Edit:trying it out now, seems to work really well. There are two settings for it, both under Settings>Power.
One enables it at all (and is turned on by default once updated), the other enables it on battery power specifically.
With it enabled, pressing the power button to sleep mid download will pop up a dialog window asking if you want to download with the screen off, or sleep. The initially selected option is download before sleep (so pressing A without intentionally changing your selection will choose this option). If you don't press any buttons for 10 seconds it will just go directly to sleep instead.
Is it possible to make it to only activate when plugged in?
That's the default, if I understood this correctly. But I haven't tried it yet.
That's the default mode, you have to manually toggle a setting before it will do it on battery.
This might, just might, make me take part in installing a beta update.
I've been on beta for years with no issues, if that helps.
I turned on beta within the first week of getting mine and have only had two issues at all with base behavior.
Only took 3 years
Wonder if they'll also add an option to wake up periodically to enter this mode when plugged in.
Would be nice for the Steam Deck connected to the dock and making sure updates are applied while at work...
The future is now
I do wonder how low-power it is. Like is it just low power because the screen is off, or are some part of SteamOS shutting down as well to save power.
The steamOS UI uses a decent bit of power by itself, but that power drain goes away completely once you're in game (you can get much better power life in low power games like Stardew than you can on the steam library screen for example).
I'm guessing this turns off the UI while downloading, which should drop power usage a fair bit. However downloading itself can be quite power consuming, so there's definitely going to be some drain still.
I'll take it!
Next i hope they let the damn thing remember wifi passwords after restarts. It seems to have been doing that more recently, which makes me hope for it to eventually treat WiFi like a phone or laptop or tablet etc does
I’ve had two release day LCD and a release day OLED. None of them have ever forgotten their WiFi password running the stable OS release.
I run beta branch on OLED and no forgor passwords yet. I wonder why it's so hit or miss with others.
Swapping between home Wi-Fi and mobile hotspot at work regularly.
I've had it act like it forgot the WiFi password, but I think it was just a connection issue. I think I just backed out without entering anything and tried reconnecting, and it reconnected fine with the stored password.
Hurrah! I don't download much - I don't have a lot of screen time and I tend to play games slowly - but I also have slow internet, this is great for me. Don't know why steam deck didn't do this before but I'm glad it will now.