I got the hell outta the US a couple of months ago, and had to ditch my main PC and home server due to shipping costs (kept all my drives, of course). This left me with just a laptop and the Deck -- but, after the laptop's screen kaput, I was left with just a USB-C dock and the deck to get me by! I was worried I'd be walled in a bit by the deck's read-only system, plus my unfamiliarity with Arch (I'm a bit new to the linux game, and have been mostly main-ing Debian distros so far)... but I've been pleasantly surprised at how much is doable, given the constraints! In fact, besides DaVinci Resolve, I don't think there's anything I haven't been able to get running!
It's been a lot of fun configuring the deck's desktop environment to serve as my main machine! Between video editing in Kdenlive, working on documents and code projects for school, and (of course) playing just about every game I'd normally play... this thing is an absolute beast!! For fun and function, I use this thing just about all day, every day, without it skipping a beat (except that one time I broke fstab 😅).
Today I had the realization that I could get a local LLM instance installed for the hell of it... and I had to just sit for a moment in awe of how incredible this machine is. I felt compelled to share my love for this machine with a community that shares the sentiment, and so here I am! I'm taken back to the early NVIDIA shield tablet days, when HL2 was ported to android... man, I struggled trying to get a cracked APK working on whatever android tablet I had at the time, wishing I had the money to get that shield to play HL2 on the go... Now, here I am playing Master Chief Collection, Helldivers 2, even Factorio and FTL, all on the toilet or in bed... and all on the same machine I can install a Deepseek instance on. Absolutely amazing.
What are some niche applications / use cases you've gotten working on your deck?
P.S. - I apologize for the state of my setup -- it's the best I can do at the moment! A new desk has not quite been on our priority list for the last couple of months 😅 we're getting ourselves to an IKEA this weekend to get one, but until then I've been standing at this wobbly-ass bookshelf, making due!! 🙂
There's a lineagoOS fork that comes prepackages with microG as well, helping to keep google services style stuff working (maps links etc) without using any actual google services. It's my daily driver, would recommend!
https://lineage.microg.org/
YMMV - some stuff still flat out doesn't work if it's too reliant on google services. Graphene is definitely better in that regard, if you have a pixel.