DeckPC - Day one

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