I use it as daily driver. I have a JSAUX dock with ssd for home, I unplug and bring it with me to university and use it with a bluetooth folding keyboard and house I got for <50$.
It does everything I need. I’m a CS Major and “Boxes” works well for any sandbox environment I need.
If you’re super technical, some thing in SteamOS can limit you, like how system files are on their own partition that gets wiped every update. But it’s perfectly doable
I’m a cs student rn and there’s a lot of stuff that I’m learning specifically with UNIX and Linux related things. I use my steamdeck as a daily driver (literally sit in the front of class, pull out my steamdeck with my jsaux case and Bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo)
There’s some issues with the walled garden. The way they do system updates is basically by having system stuff on its own partition and overwriting it. It functions well for a “casual” person that doesn’t care about linux that much.
The issue is that I have to install things sometimes. Even things as simple as an OpenVPN package so I can use my nordvpn. Updates sometimes will wipe things I install in package manager. Other things (like Xelatex) are simply too big to fit in this partition so I have to install lighter packages even if I want to use the whole thing (Math formulas need a LOT of symbols).
This has actually led me to see if it’s worth it to install a third party OS. Bazzite was a good contender but I like Arch with the KDE desktop so ultimately I would just want a steamOS that I could install more things on.
Currently I’m looking into how I can achieve this. I don’t know if I should just enlarge the partition holding the system files, or if there is some pacman settings that I could have packages installed elsewhere and automatically symbolically linked in /user or wherever it needs