Hello, dear friends of r/SteamDeck . As made apparent by the title, I’m interested in using my Steam Deck as an alternative to my main PC. Basically, electric bills are killing me, and I thought that the Steam Deck would “eat” less electricity than a Ryzen 5900x with an RTX 3070. Yeah, it might not perform on the same level, but, theoretically, it should do for browsing, keeping notes, and editing text…
…
…right?
For this is the reason I’ve come here to ask you about it. I just ordered a Corsair 1TB SSD and a JSAUX dock from Amazon.de (I live in Greece, so this was the most affordable option), and am planning to basically “clone” my Deck’s lowly 64GB MMC on the new drive, and then use it with the JSAUX dock connected to two 24’’ monitors. Theoretically, a quick search showed me that it should work.
However, I find that Steam OS is too restricted and limited for everything I need. It’s great for gaming, but it would be awesome if I could also run a virtualized version of Windows. Would it be possible to install something like an alternative-but-compatible Linux distribution as a secondary OS on a USB flash drive to boot from there? Do Linux distributions like, say, Mint, support the Deck’s hardware (to be clear: for use as a secondary-OS desktop, NOT as a full Steam OS replacement)?
Alternatively, can I install Windows on a USB stick to “run natively” on the Deck, but without affecting its Steam OS installation in any way? I guess it would be possible to install it from my PC as a Windows-to-Go installation on a USB flash drive, and then use that to boot the Steam Deck (from its Power+Volume Down “boot device selector”)… but are there any hardware compatibility issues, and should I know anything about missing drivers or any hard-to-solve problems?
I’d appreciate any ideas and suggestions by anyone who’s already gone through such an adventure.
I’d advise against trying to do some weird form of virtualization on the modest deck hardware or even doing a slow USB install of windows. Instead; Just resize the steam partition of the drive to give you a 250GB windows partition (or whatever size ratio you want to use. Run windows natively that way, and you can dual boot between steamos and windows whenever you want. (there are several guides on how to do this)
I do this on my deck, I have a 2tb drive and I allocated 256 at the end of the drive for a windows install. I spend 90% of the time using steamos, but I can boot into windows on the deck whenever I want if I want to play around with something there. All the windows drivers work at this point in time; there is no hardware that won’t work in windows.
Awesome! Thanks, that’s precisely the kind of information I was asking for, since I’ve run into conflicted posts about Windows compatibility with the Deck’s hardware.
However, even if using virtualization on the Deck, and despite it not being a powerhouse, I don’t expect it to offer a much worse experience than what I’d been using up to months ago: a ten-year-old Intel Q6600 with a GTX 970. AFAIK, the Deck is relatively similar as far as performance goes.