I don’t know, I’m definitely a fan of my deck, but it seems to me like the clunkiness of that setup would be a hindrance. With one of those LapDocks you would essentially have to find the space for both the deck and the laptop, and live with the wires connecting them, as opposed to just having an actual laptop. Then there’s the fact that the deck is running a tweaked version of Linux with all the issues that come with that.
For sort term use I could absolutely see plugging the deck into a regular old monitor and just getting by with that. For long term spending the same money you’d spend on the LapDock on an actual laptop (new or used) and installing a full fledged Linux distribution would result in something way more functional. Then when you want to game you pull out the deck, and you have a normal laptop you can use for other purposes, with actual portability if you need it.
If you need Windows for your use case, the actual laptop option is probably even more compelling, as it would likely just work right out of the box, with zero configuration required.
I recently read this article about AirTags, and this post made me think of it.
One of my main takeaways was that the anti-stalker features of AirTags are a bit of a liability for this use case. Imagine you successfully hide your AirTag inside the Deck, and a few days later it starts beeping. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t stay hidden for long! Admittedly, you could potentially remove the speaker when installing it to prevent this.
The other thing I saw, which was a bit more worrying, was that the police were not really inclined to help, and took some prodding. They also got lucky that the stolen item was in a store they could just walk into. If someone steals a Deck and then takes it into their house, who knows if the police would even bother trying to get it back.
I feel like if the goal is to avoid the risk of theft, I would probably look into more physical security. Just keeping it on my person at all times when in high risk areas, potentially in a locking case?