I got the hell outta the US a couple of months ago, and had to ditch my main PC and home server due to shipping costs (kept all my drives, of course). This left me with just a laptop and the Deck – but, after the laptop’s screen kaput, I was left with just a USB-C dock and the deck to get me by! I was worried I’d be walled in a bit by the deck’s read-only system, plus my unfamiliarity with Arch (I’m a bit new to the linux game, and have been mostly main-ing Debian distros so far)… but I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much is doable, given the constraints! In fact, besides DaVinci Resolve, I don’t think there’s anything I haven’t been able to get running!
It’s been a lot of fun configuring the deck’s desktop environment to serve as my main machine! Between video editing in Kdenlive, working on documents and code projects for school, and (of course) playing just about every game I’d normally play… this thing is an absolute beast!! For fun and function, I use this thing just about all day, every day, without it skipping a beat (except that one time I broke fstab 😅).
Today I had the realization that I could get a local LLM instance installed for the hell of it… and I had to just sit for a moment in awe of how incredible this machine is. I felt compelled to share my love for this machine with a community that shares the sentiment, and so here I am! I’m taken back to the early NVIDIA shield tablet days, when HL2 was ported to android… man, I struggled trying to get a cracked APK working on whatever android tablet I had at the time, wishing I had the money to get that shield to play HL2 on the go… Now, here I am playing Master Chief Collection, Helldivers 2, even Factorio and FTL, all on the toilet or in bed… and all on the same machine I can install a Deepseek instance on. Absolutely amazing.
What are some niche applications / use cases you’ve gotten working on your deck?
P.S. - I apologize for the state of my setup – it’s the best I can do at the moment! A new desk has not quite been on our priority list for the last couple of months 😅 we’re getting ourselves to an IKEA this weekend to get one, but until then I’ve been standing at this wobbly-ass bookshelf, making due!! 🙂
I emulated windows 7 in an attempt to play an old SpongeBob game. Unfortunately it’s an XP exclusive. Anywho when I tried emulating it directly it wasn’t working due to a false positive cuz my disk is old and corrupted.
Fladder!
Basically I’ve been using Jellyfin for some years for streaming. Once I got the steam deck, I thought it’d be awesome to use it for offline viewing of Jellyfin content when I’m too tired to focus on a game, on long trakn rides!
So I looked for Jellyfin desktop clients, found one that I liked with offline downloads, namely Fladder. The install process for the Steam Deck wasn’t straightforward, so I learnt Flatpak packaging and submitted a PR to the GitHub project, which was well received. I can now watch my TV shows on the train when I don’t feel like playing!
I sold my laptop last year and it took me 2 months for me to find the PC parts I wanted. I’ve got nothing exciting to report. I used the Steam Deck as my full time PC for 2 months and it worked perfectly for home use and as a virtual workstation for remote logon for work. This basically gave me the confidence to move to Linux fulltime and I put OpenSUSE on my PC by the time I got it built.
I still have to use my wife’s windows laptop for some hardware peripheral settings (my GP2040-CE custom controller, Logitech mouse macro button settings, gamesir controller), but overall using the Steam Deck fulltime was a good experience.
I’ve got a G502 and couldn’t get Piper to work. Are there particular permissions I need to give it in Flatseal?
My son-in-law got a deck as a cheap gaming PC but also needed to be able to use Adobe software which we were struggling to get working in bottles / wine so we setup virt manager and added a windows VM with a shared folder between host and guest VM. Works great and he’s learning a lot about linux as his daily driver without losing access to the tools he needs for work.
Wow, for real?? Still within steamOS?? That’s something I haven’t yet approached since I figured virtualization wouldn’t perform well enough - but adobe products via virtualization is impressive!!
How did you do it, if you don’t mind me asking? Like did you follow a guide or is there a specific app you used? 🙂
Yep, initially tried to setup virtual box as I’m more familiar there but could not for the life of me get around install errors. After setting the OS to read-write installing virt manager was pretty straight forward; the only real hiccup I had was that I needed to install win-fsp on the guest os before installing guest additions like virtio-fs which allowed me to add the shared folder between host/guest. Edit: it also required enabling shared memory and updating some registry keys during windows install to ignore the windows 11 install requirements.
The SteamDeck is actually a good writerdeck. Get an external keyboard, some kind of stand and you have a highly portable typing machine
And before someone compares the volume or footprint to a laptop: if you get a case for the steam deck with a kickstand, there are places you can stick it that a laptop could only hope to perch anxiously at best.
Nothing really. I mostly just use mine as a smart TV. I do want to make games and use the Deck as reference for hardware specs I want the game to run well on. Hardware target? No idea what you call that.
The Deck is a pretty nefty device. I used it for half a year as a daily driver, which included everything from gaming to light embedded development. I’ve also used it as a ground control station when flying my legacy drones, or as a relay for my main rig when tinkering on unhandy equipment (such as accessing my cars OBDII from the warm living room).
I’ve also tinkered with secured storage on the Deck, but found that LUKS needs the Deck to be unlocked (note: All of the above can be done without disabling the read-only system). I found a somewhat functional workaround using rwfus, which makes an overlay on top of the read-only system, on which I then can install packages such as veracrypt. I also tried NIX to this end, but found it to be way too much work to learn to use proper for my usecase.
And while not really anything mind-bending: I’ll be spending the next few days in our summerhouse with my sister to celebrate ‘Fastelavn’, where I expect to bring my Deck and a Steam Controller for some evening Kingdom 80’s co-op.
Nice!
I’ve found Distrobox to be a great way to access stuff I’m more familiar with from my Debian distros. Builds little containers that make use of some existing binaries from the steamOS environment. I even found some super curated ‘boxes’, specifically for Davinci Resolve, which is promising! (That box didn’t work in my case, but it’s cool that sort of thing is in development! 🙂)
Right now, large external storage drives plugged into it through a dock, and SSH to access from my desktop so the drives don’t spin up any time my windows machine thinks it needs to see what’s on every drive.
That and connected speakers to use it as a boombox connected to SomaFM.
It’s a pretty good mini-pc when not being used as a gaming portable.
First time I’d heard of SomaFM - what a cool service!
I haven’t done it yet and it’s probably nothing special, but just yesterday I was thinking about using my Deck as a hi-res audio playback device. My main PC makes the room so hot during summer that I was planning to buy a mini PC just for this, but if my Deck can do it I’ll be saving some money. I have some albums in DSD256, but I think it should be possible? I need to finally decide to do it, probably during the weekend.
I started “The Odin Project” in the deck, because the course prompted me to either mess with WSL2 on windows or switch to linux, so the SteamDeck it is :)
I also set up a secondary setup for my girlfriend with it, even tho my initial intention was to use it handheld most of the times, but it has worked out beautifuly, even with dual monitors!
And I use it as a SmartTV tool, I take it from my desk and dock it on the living room
Oh wow, first I’ve hears of the Odin project! Very cool!
Also love the idea of using it as a SmartTV!
![[Discussion] - What are some niche applications / use cases you've gotten working on your deck?](https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/0b772b33-2088-4d8f-8c1b-73ca11bbd7e9.jpeg){kind=link}