I’ve got the Keychron K7, it has low profile switches and keycaps and works pretty alright. Since I use my Deck as a dev machine and do my general computer stuff on it as well, In almost always bring it with me.

The downside to the K7 I’d say is the battery life. I often have it plugged in when at home and it lasts me when I’m out but the Bluetooth dies quickly on it when I forget to do so.

They have a re-programmable version of it as well and while I don’t have that one to save a bit of cash I’d wager it works a bit nicer.

There’s also different switches available to purchase. I have the keychron browns but hope to upgrade to the Gateron Banana or equivalent one day.

No, Njalla is. They have a history of stealing domains and banning users without explaining why and absolutely refuse to look into why a user got banned in the first place. On top of that generally terrible customer support.

I’ve had the complete opposite experience with 1984.hosting, support has been great and they even support GPG keys to one of their emails if you want to keep your inquires encrypted.

1984.hosting has a freely available to use DNS service for domains. They’re a good company that does what Njalla say they do but without the bullshit of stealing peoples domains.

I have a .cloud address that works fine. Just make sure DKIM, SPF and HELO is setup and configured properly.

Sleep is FOSS now

Search is definitely lacking sadly. Unsure if there’s even solid plans to make it much better either.

I don’t do a lot of message searching so luckily for me, it’s not something that bothers me too much.

Matrix seems like a perfect fit for you then!

Wow, good stuff. First when I saw the post my brain literally thought it was made for chronically online people but then I remembered about the business applications… Maybe I’m too chronically online…

I might give this a go for a friend of mine who just started a company, it will most likely be an amazing tool for him!

I am curious about the AI implementation, is it also ran on the server or do you connect to an external service like OpenAI? If it’s local, which model is it running and is it ethically sourced data?

I’ll be keeping an eye on this project, seems great and I’m so glad you made it open source too!

Currently I’m playing through Ready Or Not, the engine update and them adding FSR3.0 made the game playable at the best of times! However the Deck still freezes and crashes occasionally sadly.

It’s the repeating steps of ADHD

1. Not have the capacity to manage.
2. Get depressed.
3. Have worse capacity to manage.
4. Go back to step one.

While I love Bazzite and have been using it as my primary OS on my only computer which is a Steam Deck, I’m not sure I can agree that a non-tinkerer should go with it. I’d probably follow along the Linux Mint train honestly. It’s an honest project with their heart in the right place and makes usability a breeze and with a wider community than rpm-ostree based Fedora it’s probably gonna be more minor issues and annoyances in the long run.

I wish I could upvote twice, you’re gonna save me so much time.

I’m thinking it’ll probably be way better for sustainability as well. Since I do need the performance I do and the Deck hits that performance within a good margin having to spend €12000 on a laptop with good build quality and good specs just for it to break or have some shit happen to it after the warranty is out feels like shit. So I’m thinking because the setup is semi-modular and each of the part of the setup isn’t super expensive it can still be worth it in the long-ish run. My steam deck break? I buy a new part from ifixit. The monitor breaks? Worst case scenario I can get a new one and possibly an upgrade since this market is new and moving. Keyboard and mouse breaks? Easy to replace that too.

Downside of course being the clunkiness of having to carry around all that and the time spent setting it up rather than just getting the laptop up and fold it up.

Something along the lines of 2K or more with at least good colour accuracy would suffice for me! It’s all I need for the photo editing part. Having plugged it into my 4K TV it went very well. All the UI elements and such displayed perfectly and smoothly for the most part. So 4K on the Steam Deck is most definitely doable! At least if you disregard gaming that is which isn’t the main goal for this project.

Does your steam deck output to 8K when you plug it into the TV? How are UI elements and FPS on that resolution for you? Would be fun to see where the limit would be.

This has been my primary concern with getting this to work as well. If I do decide to go with the portable monitor which I’m leaning more towards now it’ll for sure be a bit more clunky to get out the monitor, plug in the steam deck, pull out a mouse and keyboard and make sure their paired and then get going. Our trains here are very spacious most of the time unless it gets crowded so for the most part that itself wouldn’t be too big of an issue but depends on how much effort I feel needs to go into getting everything setup for my usual 40 minute train ride to get a few write-ups on my assignment done. Realistically I would probably skip the monitor and get the keyboard out and use the touchscreen thinking about it.

That seems to be the gist for most of the portable displays and lapdocks available. I know there’s a few portable displays that can charge the Steam Deck properly but they’re usually far between. I’m slightly put off from getting 1080p since it’s been a very long time since I settled with that resolution and to me just feels slightly too little. Especially when I’m gonna edit photos and browser the web. I’m gonna check around a bit for 4K portable monitors since there doesn’t seem to be any brand ones that are 2K.

Bazzite seems very interesting. Thanks for the link! HDR to me is a bit of a second priority, it sure is nice but it doesn’t make and break anything. Currently trying out Windows on the Deck and seems like HDR seems to be broken for me there. Sadly the option on my TV to fix it seems to be greyed out in the settings.

My desktop experience so far has been great actually. While the CPU itself isn’t as strong as my previous 5900HX the GPU performance is indeed noticeable when running about in some software. It’s a great try-out at least!

And as someone whose been distro-hopping for 10 years and tried loads of different setups it’s been my personal conclusion :)

In the end the browser isn’t everything, it’s also UI of the desktop environment and the file explorer and how some things are handled. That I find more comfortable with Windows, but when I manage my servers I love using Linux and when I need to do web-dev stuff too.

It wouldn’t be for gaming. Mostly running VMs, managing school assignments and general browsing and voice chatting. If I do end up booting up a game I wouldn’t mind utilizing FSR as much as possible.

I don’t intend to do any gaming on an external monitor I think. Even if I do I think I’ll be happy enough with FSR!

You don’t seem to be alone in disliking the build quality of the NexDock. I wish more people had input to the UPerfect devices but their displays seem good. I’ve heard of more “proper” display brands doing some portable displays too that I can look into to get a bit more reliable warranty and such.

Have you found yourself preferring using an external keyboard and mouse with the NexDock? That would probably be the biggest downside to the solution of using the monitor only solution. Having to chuck with me a Bluetooth KB+M.

I’m glad for your input tho, helps a ton!