Just a reminder to everyone who hasn’t thought about it, but the Steam Deck works pretty good as an home theater PC.

I mainly watched Youtube on my smart TV before, but over the past year its remote reciever has been spotty. Eventually I learned that GrayJay has a flatpak version, which allows you to watch Youtube, Nebula, Patreon, Peertube, etc in a single interface without ads. And adding the flatpak as a non-Steam game to access it in Game Mode is easy.

Since my TV has enough physical buttons that I can manually switch the inputs without the remote, I could use the Steam Deck like an old physical Roku or ChromeCast.

I know some of you don’t like the group behind GrayJay (FUTO) or have Jellyfin servers and could get more use out of Kodi instead. That’s perfectly fine. The main point of the post is to encourage y’all to think outside the box on what you can use your Decks for, because it doesn’t have to just be for games.

  • Nate Cox@programming.devEnglish
    8·
    1 day ago

    I wanted to use the deck as a PC but I couldn’t do any dev work on it without jumping through hoops thanks to a lack of tooling provided and the immutable nature of SteamOS.

    However, replacing StreamOS with CachyOS Handheld has reopened doors there in a big way.

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
      9·
      1 day ago

      I am going to make a post soon, especially if people are interested, about how to use Boxbuddy with Distrobox to create mutable atomized linux distributions you can add packages to and do whatever you want with while retaining the vanilla immutable Vanilla SteamOS settings. There are a lot of advantages to this method, one of them being that you can easily set up many different atomized linux environments with different versions or combinations of packages for testing or other use cases.

      I am still encountering some limitations but I have Debian with R and Python along with multiple geospatial packages for both languages and Pandoc installed in an atomized linux distribution and it works great. I just installed emacs on the atomized linux distribution itself and having been using org mode to execute R and Python with codeblocks and set up a workflow that way.

      https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.dvlv.boxbuddyrs

      https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Distrobox