I was out of country for the past month. I have access to two monitors, and I brought a keyboard, wireless mouse, and a small JBL speaker. It has been a pretty good experience. I have edited documents, images, and created PDF’s. I can connect to jobs that require windows with a web browser to Azure Virtual Desktop. I have streamed live events, worked on my home servers, and it is always snappier than a windows machine. With a click I am back in handheld gaming mode playing SNES games, or Elden Ring.
I like how Valve not only pushed Linux gaming, but also introduced some people to desktop Linux. I see many comments of people realizing It’s not all that scary and sort of useful after all and it can even show some advantages, like the said snapiness. Being realistic I don’t expect the platform to ever go truly mainstream, but enlargement of the niche is very much possible.
Also first post to Lemmy. I figure we all gotta contribute as I am liking it here.
My Firefox is synced with my desktop, Joplin is my note taker synced to an S3 instance. I use KDE connect on my desktop at home, I have not tried it with the steam deck, but I am thinking I should.
The versatility of deck is just too good. If you don’t mind, do share a picture of your setup. I would love to see the steam deck in action at work.
Ok this is a bit potato. Sorry about that. I was trying to figure out how to show it was a steam deck AND prove it is running on it. Obviously this isn’t the way I would lay out the work normally, but I wanted to show many things at once. On the left is the Firefox Work Container with Remote Desktop in Azure. You can see Edge and Excel on a windows desktop. I use containers to keep work items separate from personal browsing. You can have many containers to isolate them from one another. Another way to connect to remote desktops that are on physical machines is using Remmina it supports RDP.
Above and to the right is Kate. Below that is Firefox with an amazon link to the USB device I am using: Caldigit usb C. It isn’t mine, like the monitors I am only borrowing it. I do carry an Anker one with me though.
On the right is Lemmy, and then far right is a concert being streamed and displayed using Firefox’s Picture in Picture with the sound playing over the portable Bluetooth JBL speaker (waterproof!). Because right now that is what I am doing, listening and watching this show.
Issues: full screen is weird on the left side, but you can use all the real estate if you dont ask for full screen. On the right, remote desktop gets odd when full screen if using an HTML browser interface.
Again sorry about the potato pic. When I am actually doing something I would layout the screen differently. And steam is running in the background, lol.
Edit: By the way posting images to imgur is so easy in KDE: just click the image to open it, select share > imgur. It will post to imgur and copy the url right into your clip board. Couldn’t be easier.
Thanks for the picture. This looks sick!
Apart from the versatility of the device itself, I feel a lot of this is enabled by remote apps, containers and systems which improved by a lot due to the pandemic. :-)
Also, nice to see you mention CalDigit. I plan on using CalDigit TS4 with the deck to connect it with my desk setup. I have to dig a bit on the support/compatibility.
