So I’ve been looking at upgrading my PC and it looks like I can get a better “micro” pc than my current (ancient) desktop for significantly less money than a full blown gaming rig. An example of such a rig is this.
I don’t have high gaming requirements - I play mostly old games, I think the newest games I play are from 5+ years ago.
What reasons are there for not buying one of these (over a comparable “proper” desktop)?
+1 on the Steam Deck train. I’ve been in the hospital the last few days, it’s been a godsend, playing Silksong between doctor visits.
You can get a dock if you want a full sized monitor or a real mouse & keyboard. The deck also has two trackpads, which is sufficient for slower mouse games like city builders while in handheld mode.
Because Valve is selling a lot of Decks, game developers are starting to use it as a watermark for low-end performance when tuning their games.
I will admit the Deck’s CPU is a few years old, you can probably get a faster portable if you really want, but SteamOS makes things pretty easy. Technically I can drop the Deck into desktop mode with a Linux KDE environment, but I can’t remember the last time I had to. Maybe when I was trying Minecraft?
I suppose it’s not solely for gaming which turns me off the deck option; it would also be serving as the entry point for some self hosted stuff I’m running on the clunky old unit that’s still chugging along.
Ah, well, it does have a desktop mode, but it’s Linux + KDE, not Windows. It can probably do what you want, but it would be some adjustment to the new environment.