Thank you yet again for doing these! <3

It’s exceptionally well as always!

Thank you so much for making these! It’s great to see if there’s anything I’ve missed!

I’m glad my tinkering could be of use to you!

I run my Deck as my primary computer and have been for about a year or so now. About 10 months without any Windows computer or alternative computer around. It’s been shugging and tugging away at all my projects where I do audio editing, gaming, voice chat, using my Sony camera as a webcam, editing sheet music through MuseScore, intensive web development and managing my servers.

There’s a lot that can be done with the Deck and I’m sure I’m in the 1% if not less of people using it as intensively as I am. I’ve made sure my Deck has a lock screen and has full disk encryption through LUKS as well which both is important to me since I work a lot on it when I’m away from home.

If you have any more thoughts regarding using the Deck as more of a PC I’ll happily share some tips and answer any questions!

I’ve actually done a tad bit of video editing on my Deck through Kdenlive and in short, it works.

I think a general issue is that Kdenlive tends to crash in of itself a bit. The biggest limitor is probably the lack of GPU based hardware exporting available for the Decks APU in Kdenlive. As well as the 16GB of RAM.

What I specifically did was load in a video file about an hours length, cut it down and overlay some recorded audio to it, sync it up and export. It was sluggish, froze every now and then and crashed a couple of times. RAM and CPU usage was continuously at high. If I remember correctly, the video was in 4K recorded on an iPhone in HDR. At least the source video was, I can’t recall if I scaled it down to 1080p or not.

I do want to mention that I’m not running SteamOS on my Deck however. I believe at the time I was running Bazzite and now I’m running Nobara. I haven’t tried doing this on SteamOS but I would imagine the experience would be more or less the same.

Will it work? Yes, kinda. Will it be as good as an experience as running it on a full fledged desktop with more RAM, higher end CPU and a somewhat modern dedicated GPU? No, it won’t. It’ll work in a pinch or if you have time and patience.

I got a pre-order LCD Deck (256GB) from mid-October. While I don’t game too much on mine but mainly do desktop work, mostly server management and web development, it holds about 3 or 4 hours depending on how heavy the task is. When I play No Man’s Sky it’ll last about an hour.

I can’t see battery health as easily in GNOME tho. But I’m not complaining. This is while being plugged into a USB-C external 1080p OLED monitor and mouse and keyboard connected with Bluetooth.

For people wondering how the battery health is calculated, I’m guessing it’s what the factory max charge was in watt hours and how many it comparably holds now during max charge. That’s at least how I’ve seen battery health being calculated before!

Currently I’m playing through Ready Or Not, the engine update and them adding FSR3.0 made the game playable at the best of times! However the Deck still freezes and crashes occasionally sadly.

I’m thinking it’ll probably be way better for sustainability as well. Since I do need the performance I do and the Deck hits that performance within a good margin having to spend €12000 on a laptop with good build quality and good specs just for it to break or have some shit happen to it after the warranty is out feels like shit. So I’m thinking because the setup is semi-modular and each of the part of the setup isn’t super expensive it can still be worth it in the long-ish run. My steam deck break? I buy a new part from ifixit. The monitor breaks? Worst case scenario I can get a new one and possibly an upgrade since this market is new and moving. Keyboard and mouse breaks? Easy to replace that too.

Downside of course being the clunkiness of having to carry around all that and the time spent setting it up rather than just getting the laptop up and fold it up.

Something along the lines of 2K or more with at least good colour accuracy would suffice for me! It’s all I need for the photo editing part. Having plugged it into my 4K TV it went very well. All the UI elements and such displayed perfectly and smoothly for the most part. So 4K on the Steam Deck is most definitely doable! At least if you disregard gaming that is which isn’t the main goal for this project.

Does your steam deck output to 8K when you plug it into the TV? How are UI elements and FPS on that resolution for you? Would be fun to see where the limit would be.

That seems to be the gist for most of the portable displays and lapdocks available. I know there’s a few portable displays that can charge the Steam Deck properly but they’re usually far between. I’m slightly put off from getting 1080p since it’s been a very long time since I settled with that resolution and to me just feels slightly too little. Especially when I’m gonna edit photos and browser the web. I’m gonna check around a bit for 4K portable monitors since there doesn’t seem to be any brand ones that are 2K.

And as someone whose been distro-hopping for 10 years and tried loads of different setups it’s been my personal conclusion :)

In the end the browser isn’t everything, it’s also UI of the desktop environment and the file explorer and how some things are handled. That I find more comfortable with Windows, but when I manage my servers I love using Linux and when I need to do web-dev stuff too.

It wouldn’t be for gaming. Mostly running VMs, managing school assignments and general browsing and voice chatting. If I do end up booting up a game I wouldn’t mind utilizing FSR as much as possible.

I don’t intend to do any gaming on an external monitor I think. Even if I do I think I’ll be happy enough with FSR!

You don’t seem to be alone in disliking the build quality of the NexDock. I wish more people had input to the UPerfect devices but their displays seem good. I’ve heard of more “proper” display brands doing some portable displays too that I can look into to get a bit more reliable warranty and such.

Have you found yourself preferring using an external keyboard and mouse with the NexDock? That would probably be the biggest downside to the solution of using the monitor only solution. Having to chuck with me a Bluetooth KB+M.

I’m glad for your input tho, helps a ton!

Actually tried it just now, went out and got a USB-C hub and plugged it into my TV, least to say I’m pleasantly surprised even tho there’s a tad of workarounds to get going. Basically just installed Steam and Valve’s drivers from the steam website and it’s pretty nice. Haven’t tested gaming performance but wouldn’t surprise me if it’s lacking.

Because I find Windows easier to use with some tasks, like Photoshop, lightroom, browsing the web, voice chatting etc. Linux and especially SteamOS I find easier to game on. At the end of the day I’ll still have use for both of them.

I have a NAS at home I can easily back things up to. For limitations on the OS I do intend to install Windows on it on a separate partition to keep things clean when it comes to SteamOS so I don’t think the RO will be much of an issue.

I’m happy to hear about your feedback to it playing 4K video with no issues and that it works lagfree on 4K too. That’s been my main concern if I end up getting a 4K or 2K screen to get my more standard resolutions available that the hardware would potentially have a hard time to catch up if I have a few processor things running at one go like a video stream in the background, editing a document and voice chatting at the same time and then on top running Lightroom to boot. But from what I can gather from user experiences it shouldn’t be too much of an issue!

I intend to install Windows on a separate partition so there I will most likely keep my school work and then use SteamOS for the gaming side of things. I think a Windows partition will mitigate most of your mentioned OS troubles.

That’s cool to hear! Have you tried on a 4K screen and video playback? Some youtube videos I’ve watched have mentioned that it can sometimes be choppy, I intend to install Windows to keep as a general purpose OS and keep SteamOS for gaming.

For the software side of things I’m most likely going to end up dualbooting with Windows, I have a lot of experience with Linux and tried for years to go over to Linux even for my photography but a partition with Windows and some editing software will have to do!

From what I’ve read the Windows experience have improved a bit so I’m thinking that’ll be my “Work/School” OS and keep Steam OS for gaming, very ironic considering how it’s always been reversed in the past.