Good day!
I need help. I have enough savings to buy a decent laptop around the same price point as the 512GB Steam Deck. The problem is that laptops at this price point are horrible at gaming. So I am seriously considering getting the Deck instead. My usual workday includes writing code in PyCharm, accessing Github through browser, and MS Word and MS Excel. Does anyone here have a decent experience with using the Steam Deck with those applications? Thank you so much.
Well, first of all, when comparing price - don’t forget that you will need a keyboard, mouse and external display to conveniently use it as desktop. And yes, it also means you need a dock, not necessarily official. When I compared prices it seemed to me that you can actually get a laptop with some low-end dedicated GPU for more or less the same money (now LED version of deck have a huge discount, so now steam deck may indeed be a better deal).
As for using it as a desktop PC, you will have to consider two possibilities: use it as is, with SteamOS, or install windows. Difference is that fro example native MS Word/Excel probably won’t run on SteamOS (at least not without tinkering), and you will have to use LibreOffice instead (IMHO, it’s very good, but some people have opposite opinion, so you have to try to to make your own decision). Browser and PyCharm will work natively.