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 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)
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 really depends on ones use case. For example, using it as a (overpowered) office PC is difficult since SteamOS doesn’t include CUPS.
yes
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.
