Steam Deck

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.