content/posts/deckpc-day-one-experience.md

   1 ---
   2 title: "DeckPC - Day one experience"
   3 date: 2022-09-10T19:47:33+03:00
   4 tags: ['steam', 'steamdeck', 'handheld', 'linux', 'deckpc']
   5 description: "This series of blogposts will be about documenting my experience with using Valve's Steam Deck as a regular Linux desktop with its preinstalled SteamOS environment."
   6 aliases: ["/deckpc-day-one-experience.html"]
   7 type: blog
   8 draft: false
   9 ---
  10
  11 This series of blogposts will be about documenting my experience with using Valve's Steam Deck
  12 as a regular Linux desktop with its preinstalled SteamOS environment.
  13
  14 ## The dock
  15 I admit I didn't pick the most *quality* dock for this use case and cheaped out a bit and rushed
  16 to purchase without much more investigation than amount of ports. The dock I ended up purchasing
  17 was from China and bought from AliExpress. It features a single 4K@30Hz HDMI port, an USB-C power
  18 delivery port and 3x USB 3.0 ports. The first hurdle I faced from lack of research was the inability
  19 to support my PC monitor's native refresh rate of 144Hz, but instead be capped to 1080p@120Hz.
  20
  21 Regardless of this setback, it still feels as smooth to my eyes, so it isn't going to be a dealbreaker
  22 or a dispute, return, refund type of deal.
  23
  24 ## Peripherals
  25 My original premise in the idea blogpost was that I would be using a KVM switch for my peripherals.
  26 That idea is scrapped, all of the peripherals are now connected to the dock instead and PC is currently
  27 in an idle state until the electricity prices become sane in Estonia - they recently put vast majority
  28 of people on hourly billing cycle based on the current exchange pricing, so it is in my best interests
  29 to save electricity where possible to avoid having to see an outrageous bill. I may revisit this once the
  30 prices are sane again.
  31
  32 What I ended up connecting was nothing spectacular, really, just an USB keyboard, mouse and a microphone.
  33 I also connected my speakers through my display to a spare 3.5mm slot, if necessary I can also get up to 4x
  34 USB ports there for use.
  35
  36 ## Out of the box hurdles
  37 The first hurdle I had when entering desktop mode with the dock was that the display was without any taskbar
  38 or icons - that was a relatively easy fix of going to the settings on Deck's built-in display and marking my
  39 PC's display as the primary, not a huge deal, but something to keep in mind for anyone reading who happens to
  40 be unfamiliar with Linux.
  41
  42 The next hurdle I had was applications from Discover (so flatpaks) being unable to open any browser links at all.
  43 This one was a lot harder to get to the bottom of with combined help of based.quest matrix chat, it took about 50
  44 minutes to reach a workaround which was documented in a [SteamOS issue](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS/issues/775#issuecomment-1129427573).
  45
  46 ## The unresolved
  47 I make no secret that I use an offline password manager [KeePassXC](https://keepassxc.org/) and one of its features
  48 is the browser integration. Unfortunately, the browser integration currently does not work between flatpak versions
  49 of Firefox and KeePassXC. There is some movement on Mozilla's end, but KeePassXC has raised their hands on their end.
  50
  51 Despite this setback, it is still possible to use the password manager - just not without browser integration detecting
  52 login fields and prompting you to fill relevant credentials for you, that now needs to be done manually.
  53
  54 ## How do I like it
  55 I often forget that I even use the Steam Deck instead of my PC. It only makes me realize when I am putting some load on
  56 the machine or try to play a game and find performance to be noticably worse than my PC. That should not discredit
  57 Deck's performance, though. It is amazing what this device can do in just 15W and I am extremely happy this experiment
  58 hit off mostly clean without many issues. I feel confident in being able to just leave my PC on hibernation for the
  59 winter ahead where electricity prices are merciless as I know the Steam Deck will be able to deliver on my expectations
  60 for daily tasks.
  61
  62 I will be making follow-up posts on this experiment going forward, documenting new hurdles and workarounds to anyone
  63 else with a Steam Deck looking to use it as a premiere desktop experience.
  64
  65 Thanks for reading,
  66 - Cernodile