this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026

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Steam Hardware

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A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.

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PSA: The Deck works well as an HTPC while docked (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 4 months ago by mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works to c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz

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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.

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[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 14 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Yeah I just use my Steam Deck as my main computer, everyone always seems to be surprised but like... the reason I didn't buy a Nintendo Switch was so I wouldn't have a piece of essentially bricked hardware outside of very narrow controls....

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[+] natecox@programming.dev 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

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[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 9 points 4 months 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

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[–] homik@slrpnk.net 2 points 4 months ago

I would expect a container to be an easy solution there.

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[–] Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Yeah that’s what’s great with the Deck.

Even if one day it’s not gonna be poweful enough as a gaming handheld, you can still use it as a poweful admin computer if you have a dock, avoiding a bit of e-wate.

I have all the Playstations except the first one and they’ll probably just become bookshelves or pieces of art when I put my hands on a Steam Machine to go along my Steam Deck.

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