I was out of country for the past month. I have access to two monitors, and I brought a keyboard, wireless mouse, and a small JBL speaker. It has been a pretty good experience. I have edited documents, images, and created PDF’s. I can connect to jobs that require windows with a web browser to Azure Virtual Desktop. I have streamed live events, worked on my home servers, and it is always snappier than a windows machine. With a click I am back in handheld gaming mode playing SNES games, or Elden Ring.
This is basically my plan too (minus the travel). I realized my gaming PC was only used for discord, Spotify, and web browsing since I spend exactly zero minutes per day in my office outside of work hours.
So today I decided tonight move my desktop down to the living room so I can play PC games on the couch (mainly games that don’t run well/look good on deck)
But that leaves me without a discord/spotify/browsing PC (I keep my work and personal usage completely separate), so I’m just going to dock my steam deck to my monitor instead. Upside is much lower power usage too
Why not stream games from your desktop to your deck if your internet is good enough? You wouldn’t have to go through the hassle of moving the PC and be able to run games at higher settings.
Honestly there’s juuuuust enough latency and occasional streaming artifacts that it just got on my nerve. I’m super sensitive to stuff that that. Also my internet generally is good enough, but my actual LAN isn’t great, because I’m too cheap to upgrade my networking equipment. I’ve got gigabit fiber to the house, but I’ve got a rats nest of cat6 through my walls, a bunch of unmanaged switches, and a mesh WiFi setup, some with a wired backhaul, some wireless (because I wasn’t able to get Ethernet to those rooms), so things like game streaming just don’t work that well for me.
Plus like I said, it just feels less wasteful to put my PC where I’ll actually use it. And it’s not like I’ve abandoned my steam deck; I’m just not using it to even try to play big AAA 3D games anymore because I don’t need to