Hello, dear friends of r/SteamDeck . As made apparent by the title, I’m interested in using my Steam Deck as an alternative to my main PC. Basically, electric bills are killing me, and I thought that the Steam Deck would “eat” less electricity than a Ryzen 5900x with an RTX 3070. Yeah, it might not perform on the same level, but, theoretically, it should do for browsing, keeping notes, and editing text…

…

…right?

For this is the reason I’ve come here to ask you about it. I just ordered a Corsair 1TB SSD and a JSAUX dock from Amazon.de (I live in Greece, so this was the most affordable option), and am planning to basically “clone” my Deck’s lowly 64GB MMC on the new drive, and then use it with the JSAUX dock connected to two 24’’ monitors. Theoretically, a quick search showed me that it should work.

However, I find that Steam OS is too restricted and limited for everything I need. It’s great for gaming, but it would be awesome if I could also run a virtualized version of Windows. Would it be possible to install something like an alternative-but-compatible Linux distribution as a secondary OS on a USB flash drive to boot from there? Do Linux distributions like, say, Mint, support the Deck’s hardware (to be clear: for use as a secondary-OS desktop, NOT as a full Steam OS replacement)?

Alternatively, can I install Windows on a USB stick to “run natively” on the Deck, but without affecting its Steam OS installation in any way? I guess it would be possible to install it from my PC as a Windows-to-Go installation on a USB flash drive, and then use that to boot the Steam Deck (from its Power+Volume Down “boot device selector”)… but are there any hardware compatibility issues, and should I know anything about missing drivers or any hard-to-solve problems?

I’d appreciate any ideas and suggestions by anyone who’s already gone through such an adventure.

  • RJFerret@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    The only thing the SteamOS lacks is the printing service, if that’s what you’re missing, it can be installed, but would need a refresh with each update that wipes it. No big, just rerun the scripts.

    Others print from different devices, so if your docs can go online, can print from there or phone or whatnot instead.

    Everything else can just run on it without need to boot another OS, I’m baffled what you found that wouldn’t.

    There have been comments/posts of folks using it for work, for software development, college students using it as their main machines, etc.