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 mode, you have to manually toggle a setting before it will do it on battery.
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.
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.
