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Comment by chorizo | Hacker News Reader

My steam deck has been my main dev pc for a year now. Also serves Qwen 3.5 9B when I use my MacBook Air. Distrobox prevents OS updates from clobbering my environment.

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Still more sensible than the 'my iPad is my main dev environment' fad from ~10 years ago. The Steam Deck is a fully fledged Linux desktop, not a defanged entertainment system.

SteamOS is Arch Linux under the hood. Mine is setup as a desktop with 4K monitor, keyboard, mice and webcam. Upgraded internal ssd, added an external drive. 16GB ram, cooling fan and AMD unified gpu. It’s designed to tolerate close to max cpu+gpu load indefinitely and runs my Vulkan simulation code overnight.

It's awesome as a desktop. Way better than modern windows. It's like a weird Linux laptop you can unplug from your dock and use comfortably laying down which most computers can't.

Me too. Are you able to run full screen programs like games on a monitor with this latest OS?

The version before this broke fullscreen when I updated to the Wayland stable branch so I had to revert to X11 SteamOS.

Haven’t used mine to play games in ages, not sure. Haven’t installed the update yet because I don’t want my dev environment to get accidentally borked. But yes, the previous version couldn’t even play videos full screen.

Same. Videos too yeah. Hopefully this update fixes it but I don't see it mentioned. Weird how something like that makes it into Stable.

There is a command you can run to make the old boot partition the main partition again so reverting the update holds after reboot. Wish they built the command into the GUI.

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