Battery Charge Thresholds on the Steam Deck

This article is a transcript of a video that you can watch by clicking the thumbnail below. Hence, certain statements may not make sense in this text form, and watching the video instead is recommended.

Transcript

Now the Steam Deck is a Linux system, and there’s an internal battery, so the way I’ve been over-conscious about my ThinkPad batteries, I couldn’t help but explore possibilities of setting charge thresholds here, and this is what I found:

1. Valve did not provide a way to set charge thresholds through the regular settings menu.
2. You’d find tens of posts asking if one can do that on a Steam Deck, but the general audience here doesn’t care about it. Some believe it isn’t necessary, and some just want to use the entire capacity of the battery instead of limiting it between 20 to 80 percent, which is merely 60%.
3. Some believe that Valve may already have implemented it behind the scenes such that when it says the battery is charged at 100%, it may be 80% underneath. Upon my investigation, that clearly isn’t the case, and you can easily verify that from the KDE energy management window.
4. I finally resorted to running commands on my own, but it didn’t work either.

So with all those methods out of the way, there’s still one that remains, which is for me to manually keep an eye on the battery charge level and make sure I do not over-charge or over-discharge the battery. I know how difficult it can be on a gaming machine while you’re deeply invested in a game, but what other choice do I have?