Hey all, I want to upgrade the setup that I use on my RV. I use a Raspberry Pi 3 for basically watching videos and some retro gaming. I want to be able to play more resource-intensive games, although definitely do not require anything AAA in the highest settings - I’m talking about Starcraft 2, Shieldwall, TABS, Humankind… basically anything that runs fine on my 4-year old System76 Gazelle, that has a GeForce GTX 1650 card.
I thought I had to upgrade it to a mini PC and I was looking into some Beelink ones with good GPUs, but then I realized the existence of handhelds like Steam Deck and ASUS ROG Ally. What appealed to me is their lightness when compared with a mini PC. Right now I have a Command strip on my Raspberry Pi and I just stick it to the wall; I was trying to avoid mounting yet another thing on the shabby wooden beam of the trailer where I have the TV screen mounted. Also it seems that the mini PC fan could be noisier than what I’m used to with the Pi, and the handhelds would be better on that front as well.
However, the Pi and the Beelink seem to be better suited for connections - by that I mean the external USB drive where I keep my movies and series, the joystick dongles for our pair of GameSir T4s… if I understand correctly, the dock is what provides this sort of connectivity to the Deck, which means I can’t just hang it in any way, it would have to be sitting on the dock, mounted somehow to the wall. That is doable, but I’ve read as well that connecting USB drives is not very straightforward (I do plan to install Ubuntu on the Deck and use the software I want, not the interface that comes with it).
I also plan to do some light browsing/working on it when I bring it home, but I’m not too worried about it because if it handles gaming, it handles those.
Am I wrong in any of these things?
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The deck shines with its default OS, and while installing other OSs is possible, it’s probably not gonna be a great time. Though you may not need to, as the deck’s desktop mode is pretty capable for light browsing/working. Especially now with the addition of the nix package manager.
As for the dock stuff, you’re not wrong, but a dongle would work just well as a dock, so if you want to wall mount it, you just need to leave enough space to hang a dongle to it.
Overall, a beelink would probably work best, and give you fewer headaches if a desktop is what you’re looking for, but the deck has the portability/handheld factor. It’s really gonna be up to your needs, which one is better.
I’ve been using a Steam Deck as my only PC for almost a year now, for work (graphics design, web dev, illustration, some Blender) as well as play ofc. Aside from my suboptimal dock options (Valve doesn’t sell any hardware in my market) It’s been a very smooth experience, and I’ve not even had to disable immutability at any point.
I would like to support the point that Game Mode is one of the most important features the Deck has, and losing out on it by installing Ubuntu feels like a loss.
But I would also like to note that Steam OS now has Distrobox built in: for most use-cases you can just set up all the software you need inside an Ubuntu container without much hassle.
Ultimately though, the form factor is the main difference. If I only needed to keep it docked all the time a Deck would not make much sense. But I love shifting to my bed after a workday and playing anything and everything I would have needed to sit at a desk to do before!
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Okay, that’s an interesting opinion. What do you mean by 45% of the Steam Deck experience? And by ‘you could do both’, you mean buy both? lol
