Hello!
I often see people with different setups to dock their steam deck and play, steam deck docked to portable monitor, custom stands, TVs, or whatever.
But I've only seen people using it as their main PC while actively searching for it, and I get the feeling that that's not a very common use, and that surprises me, as I believe its a hell of an offer to buy the cheapest model (like now 330€ LCD), and run that docked as your PC. When you want to play or bring it to the couch, you can do so because you got a cheap steam deck not a cheap pc. (I know laptops exist, but c'mon)
Anyway, my uses for the steam deck are:
- Gaming (Town to City is my new favourite)
- Programming
- Studying
- Consuming media
- Breaking and fixing my home server
Normal stuff for a PC with the added bonus of
- I get tired and go to bed
- I get tired, undock it and dock it back on the living room to play on the couch
- Get out of classes to rest and play it on the car for half an hour
Anyway, I'm getting further and further away from the title, but again, this thing fascinates me. I used to have;
Main pc + 2 screens
then it was
Main pc +1 screen + 1GF with 1 Steamdeck with 1 screen
And now
1 me with 1 steamdeck and sometimes both screens (which really impressed me when I first saw it), and my gf with my used to be main PC.
And so, for you, what are your favourite or niche use cases for it? Do you daily drive it as a PC? Do you feel like the steam deck lacks anything for a good desktop experience?
pd. Yes, I really made the post image for this one post, and it absolutely took me too much time for what it is.
I have a privacy oriented raspberry pi 400, that i use for my web browsing, banking, office, microcontroller and video conversion stuff.
Steam Deck is for games and 3d modelling and other stuff that rp400 might not have enough power for.
Steam Deck is mostly 90% on desktop mode mounted on a dock with external display, mouse and keyboard.
I keep my personal stuff out of Steam Deck because I don't trust steam + games data gathering.
I allowed my son to scavenge my old desktop PC, because I didn't need it anymore.
Only gripe is that Arduino IDE is shit on both Steam Deck and RP400, but so far Thonny and micropython has been adequate.
Wow the raspberry thing is cool, and after seeing a streamer get scammed 30k worth of crypto for downloading a steam game, separating gaming from banking and such seems smart
If somebody is inspired to get one, I'd recommend getting raspberry pi 500. The 400 is OK, but needs a hefty overclocking to run most robust webpages smoothly. It can still get a little sluggish on really bloated webpages, like using steaming services from a webpage.
Good thing is that you can overclock it quite far before you need to modify the default cooling setup.
Perhaps an intel 100 or 150 would be better in this regard?
True. For example lattepanda is not a bad option, if you don't mind the price and availability is not a problem.
thats really cool, thanks for the recommendation