Comment on Steam Deck as a laptop replacement?
Grimpen@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
I pretty much use my Steam Deck instead of my laptop so the time now. I mostly take advantage of keyboards, much, and monitors available at my destinations though, so it’s much more portable.
For you typically Café office warrior, you’re going to need to pack a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, as well as put up with a small screen. The monitors and laptop-style housings you mention can mitigate that though.
Still, it’s kind of an inferior laptop option overall. You’ll either have to make do without some laptop features or end up packing more gear than with a laptop. The Steam Deck is optimized for gaming, a laptop is optimized for… officing outside an office?
Where the Steam Deck might even though is where it can be docked. It may be large for a handheld gaming device, but it is smaller than most laptops.
You will still have to accept some limitations. SteamOS is designed to support gaming. One thing I’ve noticed is no support for printing (cups). I’m sure there are others. If you were a University student and you could only buy an inexpensive laptop or a Steam Deck, I’d get the inexpensive laptop. If you have a desktop with a mechanical keyboard and buffer big monitors, and you just need a supplemental device in a pinch, and are mostly looking to play games? Then the Steam Deck would be perfect.
For me, the Steam Deck has effectively completely replaced my laptop, but I’m not typing up TPS reports at Starbucks all day. I’m mostly playing games, and accepting a substandard “serious computing” experience or packing some essentials or just using it for non-gaming in a few locations.
Zelaf@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
When it comes to SteamOS limiations, I’m most likely going to end up dualbooting with Windows so that won’t be much of an issue! As for printing, I never really print anything since I’m getting an education in IT systems administrations and virtualization so we never really print out our assignments. But good thing to keep in mind!
I don’t sit by cafés too much either but do have a few buildings I go to that are not home or not school, since I prefer to study outside of my apartment I like to bring things with me. For most weeks I’m either at my local community music school for music where there’s space to set up the setup but can be a bit clunky for sure if one compares to a laptop and folds up rather than setting up the screen plugging in the steam deck and then make sure the bluetooth is paired to the mouse and keyboard or if I get one of those Lapdocks I can short the steps a bit but will essentially be the same issue. A bit lower mobility and a bit more work to get running immediately.
My school works mostly contains of setting up VMs and working with Azure/AWS and the Windows partition will definitely help out in that regard.