The official Steam Deck docking station has finally been released for order, with an estimated 1-2 week delivery time. It costs £79 so not cheap.

I'm a bit disappointed in the design, as it doesn't really offer much over a more generic device dock (which do also work with the SD). But being official the system should sit better in the cradle. The biggest design flaw is the dock to deck connection. If they had located the USB C port on the bottom edge of the system it could have just slotted into the port on the dock. Instead the port is on the top edge of the SD, so you have to plug a cable from the dock into the top. A bit of a shortsighted solution. It's nice to just be able to pick a device out of its dock, not have to unplug it. My Amazon Fire tablet f.ex. just sits in its dock and you can just pick it up. No cables as wireless charging. Other then that seems ok.

Will pass final judgement when mine arrives.

The actual Steam Deck can now also just be ordered with no wait time. No need to preorder any longer and have to wait in a long production queue. Like the docking station, you can now buy it and expect delivery within 1-2 weeks.
[Reply]

So other than nicely moulded plastic, what else is that dock doing? If you have to plug in a cable anyway, I struggle to see the point.
[Reply]

It's a full dock, like a laptop dock. So you can have displays, keyboard, mouse, power etc all connected to the dock. Plug the deck in and it switches over to the monitor and you have a full PC running Steam OS. You can even switch to desktop mode and use it like a standard PC. Steam OS is full Arch Linux OS using the KDE Plazma 5 desktop. And the full Linux Konsole.

But Steam OS has being developed with the focus purely on gaming, so it doesn't have much installed that isn't needed for gaming. It's goal for PC gaming without the need for a keyboard and mouse. And heavilyvtied into the Steam library interface. Bit you can install what you like from the Desktop mode though the OSs own Discovery App store/repository, or using Github or from a flatpak.

The OS doesn't currently have any direct streaming support f.ex. So no built i access to services like Netflix or Spotify. But as with everything else Steam Deck related
an easy solution seem to be found to get them working. From Desktop mode you can just install Spotify from the Discovery store, then add it to Steam as a non game. Then you can play music as you game. And one cool Steam feature. You can control Steam from your phone, so you could queue up tracks without leacing your game. I will be setting this up tomorrow.

As for Netflix, I've not tried it yet, but it should run though a browser window. Not that I would want to watch Netflix on the Deck.
[Reply]

This is quite a funny story. On the Steam Deck you can encode a file to be used by the system as the boot screen or animation. It can be an image, animation or video file.

One owner decided to encode the whole of the Shrek movie as their boot screen file. But Valve only ever considered a boot animation would be a few seconds at most, so never bothered adding the ability to skip it. So this user had to wait the whole length of the Shrek movie every time the system booted.

Due to this story Valve have now added the ability to skip the intro animation.
[Reply]

Ahh that is funny. While it shows determination and initiative it also shows that if you play stupid games you win stupid prizes.

I wholeheartedly approve of such silly endeavours.
[Reply]

Good he didn't put the Godfather trilogy.
[Reply]

Or the Lord of the Rings Directors cut!

Imagine doing this though without realising you could skip it?

I'm considering making one from a clip from the film 2001. The bit showing HAL's eye as he says "Good Morning Dave".
[Reply]