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!! 🙂

    • xttweaponttx@sh.itjust.worksOP
      0·
      28 days ago

      Ah shit this is SO cool! Do you do like sound design or something with this? Or is it just fun to goof with and see what you can make?

      I found a super basic 8-bit version of this sort of thing that works in the browser and had lots of fun just finding weird sounds to make!

      • THCDenton@lemmy.world
        0·
        28 days ago

        Oh you can make full songs on the thing if you want. I like to record little bits of sound made with it and throw it in protracker2 (pt2clone)

  • Obelix@feddit.orgEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    The SteamDeck is actually a good writerdeck. Get an external keyboard, some kind of stand and you have a highly portable typing machine

  • s3rvant@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    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.

  • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    My company hired a lecturer to present some papers and illustrate new techniques in the field. He brought a Steam Deck and used it as a presentation device.

    It was awesome.

  • Stampela@startrek.websiteEnglish
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    1 month ago

    The weirdest thing so far has been setting up Steam VR with ALVR because I could. And it technically works XD

    • xttweaponttx@sh.itjust.worksOP
      0·
      1 month ago

      Shiit that’s incredible! Gahh I miss my VR, that’s one one thing I had to leave behind (my parents were kind enough to ship later for us).

      I had to ask my brother to stream me his gameplay of some VR to fill the void 😂😭 I dunno if it helped or hurt! Gonna have to hit up a VR arcade or something!

      • Stampela@startrek.websiteEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        It’s a computer, after all. But if you want to try it… don’t expect too much: a simple game, VERY pixelated by the time I’ve reduced the resolution enough was enough to make it barely hit 60fps. A cool experiment, but not much more…