I’ve been considering getting a mini PC for my living room, basically only to watch online videos without ads or watch locally stored videos.
Since I have a Steam deck available that I already often dock to my screen for gaming, could I use it instead of buying a new computer?
My main concern is the impact this would have on the battery if it’s plugged in for long periods of time, does it bypass the battery when it’s plugged in and the battery is full ? Will other components be impacted?
As I mention always whenever this topic comes up, it might be my specific setup but don’t leave it off and plugged into a dock for long periods of time: it seems to discharge the battery and not realizing it’s happened. In my experience as long as you unplug it after shutting it off, there’s no downside.
That’s a good point. I lose about 5% a from the charge limit after a whole day of the Deck being plugged in and mostly on. I suppose doing a weekly power cycle could also work.
There’s also the BIOS setting that turns the Deck on when connected to AC, just in case it does run out of battery and won’t turn on after a power outage.
What I’m describing is really nasty, as you think the battery is let’s say at 95% and you unplug it to be used as ha handheld. It’s updating a few games and you turn around, do something else… then check back on the updates and the Deck is off because it ran out of battery in a couple of minutes. I don’t think it’s good for the battery to be drained that much
That’s really extreme, I’m pretty sure that’s now at all how it should be working.
I don’t leave my deck docked that long, maybe 10 hours at the longest, but I’ve never seen anything like the battery drop you’re describing.
In a day it won’t really show up, that’s not enough time in my experience. Also key here is that the Deck needs to be off: if it’s on then everything works as intended.
Also key here is that the Deck needs to be off
Oh ok, I never shut my deck off. Closest I get is restarting to install updates.
I dont think this is normal behaviour, maybe theres a problem with your dock? I leave mine docked and plugged in for weeks at a time, and when i have picked it up to play handheld its always been at 90-95%. Never had it be below 90 after being plugged into the dock.
It does show up as nice and charged, but (in my instance) it’s very much not. As I mentioned it might be my specific setup. My theory is that something I plugged in keeps drawing power even after the Deck is off, but when the Deck is off, the charger doesn’t send power… so it uses up the battery.
Well that sounds like theres a problem with the charging circuit/battery readout. It shouldnt be reading as charged if its not, and afaik, it should still charge even if the deck is off.
That’s very alarming!
Thankfully, I’ve not had this issue, I can see the battery go down very slowly over the day once it stops charging while plugged in. I normally play games in the evening on the battery, and haven’t noticed any reduced capacity in the last couple of years…
Hopefully, before I get something like this I’d’ve finally built a new PC 😁
Yeah, it’s not a sudden thing: I believe it takes a few days just to have a noticeable impact. It’s just that my Deck lives on the dock for most of the time XD
Battery should be fine based on my experience.
If you have an OLED you can have the deck wake up when a BLE connects, but there’s also a bios setting to wake up LCD/OLED Decks when plugged in. I’ve heard of people getting smart plugs (or even remote toggled plugs) and plugging their dock charger into that. When you want to wake up the deck just toggle the power off and on, and the deck will wake up.
I’ve been wanting to get a deck motherboard to do just this with, but they’re hard to find these days
If you want to preserve your battery, follow the same principles for any battery, avoid having above 80% and below 20%. I’m not sure for KDE, but on GNOME I have a GUI utility that lets you set this and enable/disable with a toggle.
on GNOME I have a GUI utility that lets you set this and enable/disable with a toggle.
The charging controller must support that feature. Notebooks by Asus, Lenovo and maybe others do, perhaps even the Ally and Legion handhelds, but if the battery controller doesn’t support that, the toggle will do nothing.
I would say it’s great but would strongly recommend using Bazzite over steam OS even on the deck.
My biggest gripe with the steam deck is that it’s not well equipped to handle user packages in the same way OSTree is. Bazzite solves this while still mostly adhering to the design principles of steam os, so I feel it’s actually better than the stock operating system.
it’s not well equipped to handle user packages in the same way OSTree is
Can you elaborate?
Sure.
Valve’s operating system is read only and, when steam decides to update, any root level file changes will be lost between updates. This is partly good because the system will always be recoverable and update reliably, but comes with the downside that users have to take extra steps to install some base level packages (things like tailscale, syncthing etc. There’s always work arounds, but it’s not a guarantee that these work arounds will continue to work on new updates.)
OSTree is also a read only file system utility that allows packages to be layered, so users can install their own packages. When the operating system updates, these packages are rebased and preserved on the next update so user level changes can be preserved.
There’s more to this than that, but basically steam os is dependent on valve updating packages and generally leave all extensions either hand off or need to work around root filesystem. Ostree/silverblue/bazzite allow user modification by having a slightly more sophisticated updating process.
I’ve installed all sorts of things on SteamOS without “extra steps”.
I can’t say the same for Bazzite.
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holy crap. I was going to do this but was lazy but now I totally want to try something. thanks for posting.
I used my SteamDeck as a media center for a while, and it worked pretty well. I never had any battery issues. It did have a little bit of trouble on super high-quality videos, but it worked well enough for the rest
Wait a few days for CES and see what other vendors will ship with SteamOS. Asus and Lenovo usually allow to limit battery charging. Steam Deck doesn’t.
I’ve been using mine as a Mini PC for almost a year since getting it. It works great. The only issues with it I’ve personally had come with regular issues with Linux itself. The battery is still in great health. I’ve only recently had any sort of problem with it and even then I believe it’s just a reasonable hardware failure more than something caused by using it this way.
Over two years with mine, battery aging isn’t noticeable. I’m pretty sure when plugged in and fully charged, the Deck runs off of external power. I don’t know if it shunts around the battery or not, but it certainly isn’t cycling the battery.
I mostly use my deck in a few fixed locations, so it’s mostly plugged in.
re the shunt: yes it does
You can use it like that, yeah, it’s basically like a “laptop” in that sense, just a fair bit smaller.
Normally I’d recommend getting devices for a specific purpose, like a mini tower custom build for a mini PC with powerful yet efficient and affordable specs - or maybe an older used tower. Though, if cost to performance ratio isn’t as important to you as portability and ease of setup, then a Steam Deck would likely be a good choice.
I’m trying to do as much as possible with what I already have as long as it is convenient enough. So I’ll try with my Steam deck first !
Thank you all for your detailed responses, I’ll definitely give it a try! It would be great if it turns out to be convenient enough.
Yeah, just to add another voice to the choir, I’ve been using my steam deck primarily docked in desktop mode since launch. Works great, no issues, battery is still great when I need it.
I bought 2 SteamDecks for a Makerspace I run (so the students could try their Godot games on it). Both of them are now also being used as a bonus workstation, plugged to keyboard/mouse/display with a USB-C dock, and used as a mini pc for 3D modeling and printing. without any issues. Blender, OnShape and PrusaSlicer all work without a single problem.
You can use it for absolutely anything. That’s the beauty of Linux. Will it be good for it, as is? No, not really.
A lot of streaming services will limit you to 720p unless you use their first-party apps, which they don’t make for Linux.
Also the interface is not ideal for that sort of thing.
Leaving it plugged in permanently is not really good for the battery, but not a huge deal either. There’s probably some way to enable a “kiosk mode” to keep the battery @ 50%, which would be ideal.
leaving it plugged in is perfectly fine, once the battery fills up, it is bypassed and the deck is powered directly off of the wire
That’s how all chargers work. The problem is that it’s simply not great to have your battery at 100% all of the time.
no, it isn’t. A lot of systems still run power through the battery even after it’s charged. The battery ends up in a state of constant trickle charging.
In the deck, once the battery is charged, and the power cable is connected, the battery is bypassed and effectively disconnected.
And the deck only charges to 100% if it was below 90 to begin with.
