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Comment by edmcnulty101 | Hacker News Reader

Side note, is anyone using one of these as a daily driver computer for development?

The specs look decent enough and the price is cheaper than a laptop.

The stock OS comes with some weird stuff preconfigured (no encryption, weird partition layout, etc.) so it depends on how you use it. For example, you'll need to mount the system partition r/w for things like kernel updates and I wouldn't dare enable AUR on an OS explicitly designed to be updated through a third party update system without having a recovery disk handy at all times. This limitation has some impact (i.e. installing DisplayLink drivers can be a challenge) but it's still Arch but fancy.

Hook it up to a dock and it should work and perform like a laptop. With a decent CPU, quick SSD and 16GB of RAM you should be able to do certain types of dev work quite comfortably if you hook up a display or two, a mouse and a keyboard.

The thing just runs Flatpak so stuff like VS Code and Jetbrains products will run perfectly fine.

There aren't a lot of serious use cases, but if you're a casual / indie game developer, it's great as sort of a complete Linux dev kit that's also a fun toy.

This is a neat idea. Would make for a good overview video or blog post if you do end up pursuing it.

The Linux desktop seems to tweak some things in the UI to be friendlier toward users coming from Windows. Not sure if that's a valve thing or not, can't say I'm a distro guru.

It's not super performant for me on a 4k display, docked. But, it should all work with a nice usb-c monitor, keyboard and mouse, and a dock off Amazon.

Guaranteed there will be something funky in the distro that gets in your way at some point though.

Not exactly, but I ssh'ed into my mine, because my sausage fingers couldn't handle messing around with correcting corrupted emudeck profile. It is basically a PC. It ran Kingdom Come and CP77 well with heatwave being the only apparent notable side effect. I am sure people will soon be posting all sorts of weird deck setups:>

I think it's not very well suited for that due to their root filesystem being immutable by default. You'd need to turn that off and that's not their recommended configuration. But it's not that hard to do.

Their official way to configure the system file is creating a overlay image that contains all necessary change to root file system and load that into system. This way may be more complex for a developer to do, but is much safer to end users. Because you aren't changing anything, you only add. And fxxk up only means you need to unload the newly added image.

It'd be easier to use if it can automatically do it for you though. Something like, enter a special env, install packages, leave and it automatically pop up an image for you would be nice.

I think this is quite similar to docker image layers except it is composable

I see. Interesting, but it's still too inflexible if you need something where you can easily install more packages.

I think it's just trade off you need to make if you need to make a system that is safe for random user to use. Most linux distro (except Android) just isn't safe enough for a random user to operate at full system privilege. (And sometimes even advanced user screws up, like kernel panic during install something and unable to return to last known good status)

But this situation may change after they finished dual boot support though. At then, you could probably just boot into another linux distro for serious work instead.

Cheaper than a laptop? You could get a cheaper laptop with better or equal specs if you buy used or get something from a previous year. A lot less hassle than trying to get something on custom hardware to run with no real upside.

Used T480(s) T490(s) is starting at 400-500€

Is it cheaper than a laptop? For $400 you can get a pretty good chromebook that has a full size screen and keyboard.

That said, it would probably work so long as you connected an external keyboard.

Steam Deck has 16 GB RAM.

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