I am using my PC for gaming 80% of the time. Instead of buying a new PC (mine is getting old), I was wondering if I can just buy a Steam Deck with docking station, to work as PC substitute.

How hard would it be to:

  1. Play strategy games with keyboard/mouse/screen setup.
  2. Mod steam games.
  3. Browse web through a browser that supports adblocking.
  4. Watch Netflix/D+/Twitch.
  5. Install random linux apps (e.g. Anki).
  6. Do some recreational python programming .

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  • xmBQWugdxjaA@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    The CPU is quite weak for strategy games (depending on what you play - Victoria 3 was unplayable for example).

    Netflix limits you to 480p on Linux desktop IIRC (although there are some workarounds). Personally I refuse to pay Netflix’s extortionate prices due to this.

    All the others are fine but you’ll need to disable the read-only mode if you want to install stuff to the system (and re-install it after every update) - e.g. anything installed via pacman/paru. That said, maybe Python is okay since you can use pip install --user to avoid the read-only issue.

    But for most apps you can probably use Flatpaks anyway (install from the KDE Discover store).

    One annoying thing is that the root partition is really small (compared to the home partition), so you really can’t install much directly to the system via pacman. That was my main issue when using it as a desktop for a little while.