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Steam Deck Thoughts

So I pulled the trigger and bought a Steam Deck (256GB LCD) while it was on sale for the Black Friday sale. Then I grabbed a 1TB nvme drive and a USB hub.

General thoughts? It is a great device. It isn't without issues, but it is definitely a good value buy. Almost too good a value, made all the better by recent hardware price increases.

This is no silver bullet. The battery life isn't going to make waves, especially on the LCD model and there are going to be games that you can't play or which don't play well. I also hit a few times where the Deck froze on me for seemingly no reason, though always when launching a game so it never impacted game play. Oh, and I've yet to successfully get the thing to install Docker, but that is not a problem most people care about and there are VM related solutions to that particular issue (I just happen to want it running natively on the device).

And that is really the extent of the "bad". And I put bad in quotes because this cost me $400 CAD!

I would struggle to build an inferior PC for twice that. A comparable GPU alone would destroy any budget.

Right now I'm writing this plugged into my USB-C hub so I can attach a mouse,  keyboard and monitor. Working in desktop mode. And it is very much "just a PC" and the performance there is good as well.

When I'm done doing the normal PC stuff, I drop back into Gaming Mode and either use an attached XBox controller or KB and Mouse (or even just pick up the Deck and use that).

So far, the only thing that has outright not worked (that I care about) have been my attempts to install Docker.

This frees up my old PC for use to stream higher end games or to integrate into my server farm. 

Anyway, that is what I have for now. Might have more thoughts on this later.  

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