I've been thinking about this for a while. With the repairability of the steam deck and the power available to it, it seems like a no brainer to use it for a bit of school work or casual browsing, Discord etc. Like you would a normal desktop.
There's a new product type popping up called LapDock that's basically a hollowed out laptop but often with a giant battery, UPerfect has one and as well as the NexDock and they seem promising.
My personal biggest gripe is screen resolution and colour accuracy, as well as battery life. As I also do photography colour accuracy would be a great plus for me and as for resolution, I've been using 2k and higher screens for years and going back to 1080p seems like a bit of a turn off. However, UPerfect has monitor only types but having to set that up ontop of a mouse and keyboard while out and about seems less than ideal in comparison to a laptop.
Any thoughts on this? Anyone who's tried it? Anyone who've tried desktop mode on high Res screens and seen any downsides, stutters, playback trouble, etc?
Edit:
I went out and bought myself a USB-C Hub with a PD port, HDMI and 2 USB to get a feel for the desktop experience on my TV at home. Since I do most of my work related things in Windows I installed it on a separate partition using GParted to shrink the home folder and then went through the Windows installer. After installing Valves drivers from their help page without errors everything seemed to work absolutely amazingly!
Everything from 4K playback to Windows animations all goes smoothly. It's a trouble free Windows installation which from my previous experiences is a nice change of pace. The only hiccups I can notice is the occasional stutter and some Windows feeling laggy when resizing and moving, mainly the settings window and other WinUI software with lots of detailing and graphics to them.
I tried installing Deathloop through Xbox Game Pass and that worked wonderfully too. It installed quickly and I tried setting the resolution to 4K and got a solid 15 FPS! I tried 1440p as well and got around 30 and then went to 1080p where I got around 45. Not quite enough for me as I get slight headaches when below 60 but good enough I feel like. In the end for gaming it doesn't really matter since I have handheld for that. Alternatively up-scaling.
As I've tried the Windows experience on the Steam Deck now I'm gonna continue my experimenting with SteamOS and see how that goes. My biggest issue so far has been that the USB-C Hub in Windows works perfectly at 4K 60Hz but SteamOS doesn't seem to be detecting the 60Hz mode at all when the screen is at 4K. I'm gonna troubleshoot and see what I can find. If anyone has had any similar issues and know how to resolve them any pointers would be greatly appreciated!
All in all the desktop experience on the Steam Deck is amazingly smooth. Truly feels like a proper Desktop when things are setup the way I need them to be and I couldn't be happier. The question for a laptop replacement is still in the air for me however. Now that I know that the desktop experience will be as smooth as it is I'm wondering which right way to go about it would be. As a lot of people in the comments on this thread and others mention that the build quality of the NexDock is absolutely terrible, a portable monitor seems to be the better way. I suppose in the end it would boil down to either living with bad build quality to get the more seamless experience. or chucking along a bluetooth mouse and keyboard with a portable monitor which could potentially not be too big of a hassle depending on how lazy I'm feeling during the days.
More thoughts would be welcome! Especially if there's any other users who have any experience with external displays and how they're using them!
Its usefulness as a laptop replacement may be limited. Remember it's a locked down read-only version of Linux. The steam deck uses an a/b model to update. Basically there are two separate versions of the OS on the machine - when it updates it replaces one copy and makes that the default, and uses the other as the backup. Next system update it replaces the other copy and switches to that. It switches back and forth that way, putting a stock image on with each update. So you'd probably want to go down the route of running your own OS on it.
Without that it does limit a little in how useful it is as a laptop like device. It depends what you want to do on it of course, and your Flatpak apps and personal files will stay but any other customisation you do to the device will get wiped each time it does a major update. That would include any installed software outside the Flatpak route if you unlock Pacman.
It seems like a capable machine though. I have mine hooked up to my TV at 4K when at home. I use it to stream 4K game content from my desktop to my living room, but I've also played with the desktop mode in 4k and it's been good. It renders 4k video well, and we know it's capable of playing video games at 720p directly which is still generally intensive.
I can't see why it wouldn't be able to do basic graphics work, but no idea about more intensive work like 3D modelling and video encoding.
Personally I'd get a dedicated device for work but if you can't afford that or you dont want to carry more than one device around then I guess it's worth a try?
Just remember if you do use it for work that also entails setting it up to back up your personal data. Your game data is largely backed up by Steam but if you put your work stuff on there then you'll need to be protecting yourself in case of damage or theft.
I have a NAS at home I can easily back things up to. For limitations on the OS I do intend to install Windows on it on a separate partition to keep things clean when it comes to SteamOS so I don't think the RO will be much of an issue.
I'm happy to hear about your feedback to it playing 4K video with no issues and that it works lagfree on 4K too. That's been my main concern if I end up getting a 4K or 2K screen to get my more standard resolutions available that the hardware would potentially have a hard time to catch up if I have a few processor things running at one go like a video stream in the background, editing a document and voice chatting at the same time and then on top running Lightroom to boot. But from what I can gather from user experiences it shouldn't be too much of an issue!