Steam Deck notes

I’ve been very lucky to be able to buy a Steam Deck as a replacement to my PC, which I’ve wanted to replace the CPU of for some time. I opted for the eMMC model and replaced it with a 256GB NVMe SSD that I already have, which put the Steam Deck in at just a bit more expensive than replacing the CPU alone on the PC. Lower power usage is a welcome benefit with energy costs going up so much!

This might not work out in the long run as a full replacement, but spec wise it’s decent and I’ve never chased the highest quality, fastest FPS settings. I also don’t game that much these days with wanting to spend time with family and friends outside of work. So far in initial testing, the desktop mode has been great apart from a couple of bumps encountered with the read-only system partition – Flatpaks have been fine for the most part.

I don’t aim to work from the Deck much, but if I do, mostly everything I need to do can be performed from the terminal or in a browser, so no problems there. Other than that, I need to familiarise myself with Arch a bit more – I’ve used it in the past, but I’m mostly a Debian/Ubuntu user for personal computing.

I’ve started taking some notes for using the Steam Deck, mainly in desktop mode for when I inevitably wipe the device and need to start fresh again, in which case I should really script or at least create an ansible role.