Deck the halls

Despite my lack of posts, my Year Of Linux on the Desktop project isn’t dead, it’s just mutated a bit. But it’s also taken a somewhat unexpected turn.

One of the ideas I’d explored for a Linux desktop was a small form factor PC, and once I started looking at small form factor PCs I started wondering how practical/expensive it would be to get one I could use for a bit of light gaming.

And once I’d got the idea of a bit of gaming, one thing led to another and a couple of weeks ago I essentially impulse purchased an OLED Steam Deck.

It’s still early days but the Steam Deck is kind of perfect for me.

Most of my gaming these days is on a PS5, which is great, but in my small house gaming on the TV really takes over the living room. The Steam Deck is much more discreet. Attach a pair of headphones and curl up in the couch and no one would really notice.¹

The Deck is not nearly as powerful as the PS5, but that’s fine for me. I tend to find a couple of games I like and play them to death. And the ones I’m playing at the moment, like Baldur’s Gate 3 and No Man’s Sky run fine (or fine enough) on the Steam Deck.

Not owning a gaming PC for the last few decades means that I don’t really have a pre-built library of Steam games, but I do have plenty of games on GOG.com and generally these aren’t too complicated to get running on the Steam Deck. I’ve had pretty good luck with Heroic for BG3, for example (not so much with Cyberpunk 2027, but I haven’t given up on that yet), which makes it pretty straightforward to add GOG games to the Steam Deck’s interface. And some games that I couldn’t do without, like Skyrim and Fallout 4, I’ve just re-purchased on Steam.

The other thing that’s unexpectedly great is streaming games from the PS5 to the Steam Deck (I followed this guide). Unfortunately this isn’t flawless – sometimes I’ll get weird network slowdowns, despite the fact my PS5 is hard-wired to gigabit Ethernet, which is wired to a fast wifi access point which is unwired to the Steam Deck. I suspect my overly complicated Unifi setup with vlans and what-not contributes to this. Mostly it’s okay, and sometimes it’s awful and I’m not sure why, but when it’s okay it’s great.

One thing I have struggled with a little bit is the controller setup. The Steam Deck is a PC, but its main interface is a gaming controller. The Deck’s operating system lets you map the controller to keyboard commands in a quite sophisticated manner, and people upload good controller layouts which you can then download and use through Steam. And mostly this is okay, but all of the controller pre-sets I’ve tried with BG3 are breaking my brain a bit, coming from the PS5. I imagine I’ll get there eventually, but I’m not there yet.

So there you go: my Linux desktop is not a desktop at all. But it’s pretty great all the same.