articles/deckpc-day-one-experience.md

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