Hey, I’m thinking of upgrading from my old work laptop (which isn’t really built for gaming at all, but is great for productivity), and I was eyeing either an OLED steam deck or a more powerful laptop that I could bring with me and use on campus away from my home setup. I plan on using linux for either machine, but I was wondering if any of the Steam Deck’s secret sauce or price to performance puts it ahead compared to a Framework or Gaming laptop.
Also, if anyone has experience using a steam deck as a workstation/portable work setup, I would love your input on if it’s a good idea to replace a laptop with a steam deck entirely.
Framework has a few options now so you’ll need to be specific on the particular one you’re eyeing from them. And whatever choice that would be, you can do some benchmarks between their core hardware like AGPU, etc. to see how well it would stack up based on paper statistics.
But as much as I love my Steam Deck (LCD), it is starting to show its age for newer titles out there. I want to say this started with the Liberty DLC for Cyberpunk 2077 where I began noticing it. The base Cyberpunk game plays very well on the Steam Deck but any interactions in the newer parts of the map shows a decrease in frame rates and increased fan speed.
If you’re mainly playing older titles, emulating older games (can go up to Xbox 360 and PS3 with most issues in that era), or for streaming from a more capable computer, then the Steam Deck should be a good choice.
Though, I agree with someone else here that productivity can be a bit difficult on the Steam Deck unless you go for a keyboard that folds up and is made for it and feels comfortable. It’ll be more clunky to haul around like from class to class, for example, than a standard laptop would be. Though be aware that you’ll probably be using a Bluetooth keyboard, so that’s one more device to ensure is charged up. And speaking of batteries, the Steam Deck’s battery life is something you’ll want to consider and compare to another laptop like the Framework if you plan to take it with you on mobile like class to class or for studying in the library, a coffee shop, etc. My Steam Deck’s battery life has significantly decreased since using it, but I can’t exactly say what the life is like for productivity since I’m usually gaming on it and that takes a lot.
And on that note, USB devices like a keyboard do work with the Steam Deck with no issues, but you’ll want a dongle and that is going to add to bulkiness and more to carry since it only has 1 USB type C port which it also shares for charging.
Also, the choice of SteamOS could be a problem depending on what you want to do since it’s an immutable OS. If you’re just gaming and word processing, then it should be fine. But if you hope to do some tinkering in the system, you’re going to have problems there than if you went with a non-immutable distro. Of course you can install any other distro on it, including going to Windows, if you wished, but you lose out on the superior, made-for SteamOS gaming features and modes built for the Steam Deck.