I just plugged the steam deck in to a monitor and while I was transferring some roms and started to wonder if it would be feasible to use as a day to day computer while docked.
I’ve been using my Steam Deck as my primary PC both at work and at home. Very few issues. I have two monitors, power, ethernet, keyboard, and mouse all connected via a USB-C dock. I love that when I’m done with work I can unplug one USB-C cable and take my work with me. I also have an electric car, and I love being able to play my PC games while waiting for my car to charge.
As a web developer one of the biggest hurdles I had to jump through was getting MySQL Workbench running, as there’s no flatpak or working AppImage available. The lack of CUPS for printing support is another nuisance, but I believe that can be overcome without unlocking the root partition by installing it as a systemd extension. I haven’t taken the time to fully prove this theory though. You can also print using netcat.
I installed a 2TB SSD in mine. I have a small 256gb Windows partition that I rarely use for the few things I need Windows for. I also DJ as a side hobby, and I’ve used my Steam Deck for that too.
What dock do you use?
I ordered this Anker USB-C dock as soon as I got my Deck: https://a.co/d/alhyc1U
I had the old plastic stand that came with the Wii U Gamepad, it fits the Steam Deck pretty perfectly. If you go this route, and want to stand your Steam Deck up, make sure to get a short 6-inch to 1-foot USB-C extension cable. The cord on the dock is a bit too short to reach the top of the Steam Deck. Aside from that, this dock is perfect. It’s one of few I’ve found with two HDMI ports.
I also ordered the official Steam Deck Dock when it was released. I tried to use it at work, but my two monitors are HDMI, and the official dock has one HDMI port and one DisplayPort. I tried using an HDMI-to-DisplayPort adapter. It worked fine in Windows, but I could never get it to work properly in SteamOS. So now I use the Anker dock at work, and the official one at home, where I only have one monitor, or sometimes I’ll use it to plug in to the living room television.
I love how hackable and repairable the steam deck is.
You already probably found a solution, but I’ve found docker + the software a good solution.
I use it as my only personal (i.e. not work or shared) machine, and it is absolutely great. I expected to be installing a ‘proper’ linux distro on an external drive for the docked use-case, and it has turned out to be completely unnecessary. For those things not available as flatpak, distrobox/podman has been great. (The only thing that slightly irks me that is missing is support for a printing service, but I haven’t tried that hard to fiddle with that, since I can do it from my phone on those rare occasions I need to.)
CUPS maybe?
Yes, CUPS is what I’m talking about there being no good way of setting it up. (Obviously can’t be a flatpak, and no dice installing it with distrobox – trivially, at least – too tied to the system, I think)
It really depends on ones use case. For example, using it as a (overpowered) office PC is difficult since SteamOS doesn’t include CUPS.
If you unlock the root partition, you can install CUPS and whatever else you want. Steam would prefer that you use the Discover store though. Also, if there’s an update, the partition will be locked again.
I love to tinker with Linux but I like that the SteamDeck “just works”
Yeah, same. I only needed to install Lutris which for some reason was installed with an old version from the Discover store.
My SSD died a while back, but my laptop was still under warranty so I sent it in for a free replacement. In that period I used my steam deck as my main machine (with a dock hooked up to my usual work station) and it was all very pleasant.
Took a bit to get fully set up, but once you’re up and running the machine is a dream.
It is, though for a fully fledged Desktop experience you should wipe SteamOS and install an actual desktop distribution.
Apart from the obvious problem of launching it (though surely there are scripts for this) when connecting to an external display, desktop mode launches KDE which is an extremely capable desktop environment. What more would you get out of a desktop distro, and how useful would those things be compared to losing big picture mode on startup?
Other “more capable distros” let you install applications other than flatpak, and it don’t get wiped out with one update, it’s the only think differently i guess, but i use fedora and install mostly of my applications as flatpak anyway, so idk
Immutable distributions are the future. I’d suggest getting used to them. Fedora Kinoite is my daily driver on my PC.
but you can install rpm on ostree distros, not in something like steam deck
I think that as desktop the Deck could be as good, if not better of any Linux pc. Not sure with Windows OS. As portable pc, technically you can make it work with some cheap Bluetooth keyboard+mouse but that would look a bit too strange and the monitor is quite small x daily works. Still doable.
