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.

  • TedZanzibar@feddit.ukEnglish
    1·
    11 hours ago

    Bit late with a reply but I bought one with this use case in mind, thinking it could be a cost effective family PC, but immediately fell foul of the lack of proper user switching. You can sign in to different Steam profiles but on the desktop everything runs under a single predefined user with admin rights. Fine for a single person but no good for a family needing multiple distinct user profiles and access controls.

    I’ve installed Windows as a dual boot setup but it makes the whole thing much more of a faff, so it doesn’t get used. It’s back to being exclusively a handheld gaming machine.