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+---
+title: Steam Deck Workstation
+date: !!timestamp '2023-08-03'
+---
+
+I have this dilemma. Do I: a) spend ages tearing down my PC so I can lug it onto
+a train to take to my uni house and rebuild it again there, where it could
+get stolen, or b) forego the PC and simply not have a desktop workstation /
+gaming rig instead? 
+
+Earlier this year, genius me came up with a third option: 
+convert my [Steam Deck](https://www.steamdeck.com/en/) 
+into a desktop PC instead! 
+
+## Why
+
+While I was back at home over Christmas, I had played and really enjoyed 
+Overwatch 2, and wanted to keep playing once I went 
+back to university. Unfortunately for me, my laptop is both not powerful enough, 
+and not capable of outputting to external displays for Complicated reasons.
+
+The obvious solution would be to simply bring my PC, however I had a criminally 
+small desk at the time (which means I have absolutely nowhere to put it, not 
+even the floor), and it would take too much effort to bring back on the train
+with everything else I brought home.
+
+I remembered I had recently bought a Steam Deck, which had been sitting in
+my bag collecting dust, and figured I could try and turn that into my
+desktop PC. After all, it *is* a device designed to be portable.
+
+## Testing Valve's claim
+
+Valve champions the fact that their Steam Deck can be used as a normal PC.
+They have Windows drivers, and even sell a 
+[dock](https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeckdock), which I bought solely for 
+this purpose.
+
+Unfortunately Overwatch breaks when using Proton, which meant I had to install 
+Windows. This involves the tedious task of partitioning the Steam Deck.
+Additionally, my scope had expanded to wanting to install a Linux environment 
+as well, so I could use it instead of my aforementioned dodgy laptop to work on 
+projects.
+
+<figure>
+  <img src="/images/steam-deck-gparted.jpg" width=300>
+  <figcaption>
+    GParted running on the Deck. It was as annoying to use as it looks.
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+SteamOS is based off Arch, so in theory I could have just installed all
+my packages on there and replaced KDE with by preferred sway. However, the root 
+partition is mounted as read only by default, and any changes made to it get 
+completely wiped whenever SteamOS is updated. No go.
+
+Instead, I repartitioned the internal disk and decided to do a triple-boot 
+setup: SteamOS (so I can still use it as it was intended), Windows (solely to 
+play Overwatch 2), and Arch (because I use Arch btw).
+
+<figure>
+  <img src="/images/steam-deck-partitions.jpg">
+  <figcaption>
+    Internal drive partition table
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+As the Deck is only 512gb in size, I decided to go with booting Arch
+off a microSD card, which would be left inserted in the Deck's built-in microSD 
+slot.
+
+## The experience
+
+For productivity, it was great. I managed to work on some projects using it,
+got some university work done, and procrastinated a lot.
+
+<figure>
+  <img src="/images/steam-deck-arch.jpg">
+  <figcaption>My university setup</figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+For gaming, it was not so great. Turns out running games on a 1080p
+monitor is quite a bit more demanding than 720p. Overwatch 2 experienced quite
+frequent frame drops, and Counter-Strike was even worse somehow. Not to mention
+I was also on Wi-Fi, which means I'm rubber banding all over the joint anyway.
+
+There were some other issues too. The Steam Deck is nice and fast when a single
+game open is in 
+[gamescope](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope). 
+However, when trying to use it as a general desktop PC,
+its limitations start becoming much more obvious. Simple things like updating
+the system with `pacman` left the system effectively unresponsive until it 
+completed. Loading a heavy program like IntelliJ also froze up the system until 
+it finished. I don't know if this is an IO bottleneck (this partition is booted 
+off a microSD card after all) but I did observe the same 100% CPU utilisation 
+when doing simple tasks in Windows too.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+Maybe just plug a laptop into the monitor next time.