I bought Steam games and a Steam Deck just to support Valve... and I'm not really a gamer. However, the Deck has turned out to be a pretty good computing device.
My ONLY beef is that the AMD drivers do not work 100% with Blender so you don't get the accelerated Cycles rendering. Otherwise, it is great.
I can't speak for steam deck though, just my experience on a self build.
Unfortunately, some of AMD's GP-compute infrastructure is only supported on Linux through the proprietary driver. I believe these are ROCm and HIP. I'm not sure about OpenCL. I'm not 100% sure what Blender uses for AMD acceleration, but if it's ROCm, you'd need the AMDGPU driver instead of Mesa.
Could have some of these details wrong, but I believe that's the gist of it.
You can, of course, install other OS on the Deck.
amdgpu is the underlying open source kernel module -- it's in the mainline kernel.
mesa is the open source userland driver, and runs atop the amdgpu kernel driver
amdgpu pro is the closed source userland driver, which also runs atop the open amdgpu kernel driver.
what's really nice about this is that you can run a fully open source stack in your host os while running amdgpu pro/rocm inside a container.
In any case, ROCm works with the completely open source stack, and is open source itself. amdgpu, the kernel component, is the only thing needed for that, and modern upstream works fine. The integrated steam deck gpu simply can't work with it, though.
The issue that has recently been resolved was that only the amdgpu-pro userspace had working OpenCL 2.0+ support. Mesa 22.3 has better OpenCL now, but that's actually become less relevant with the new HIP/ROCm stuff.
That's a shame. I was hoping it was something I could help with, but that's a bit beyond the scope of what I can fix myself.
the open source kernel driver is the only one in use and sits under both the open source and closed source userland driver stacks.
i'm pretty sure what they're saying is that rocm doesn't support running on the apu in the steam deck at all -- i'm dealing with a similar issue in bringing up a product on a different amd apu that has a beefy enough gpu for my application
It's an RDNA2 GPU and AFAIK, all the RDNA2 GPUs can be coerced into working with ROCm (even if they are not 'supported'). Maybe the Steam Deck is an exception. I don't know. I'll give it a spin over the holidays. Win, lose or draw, it sounds like I'll learn something interesting.
When I check rocminfo, the hardware is reported as gfx1033, which is an identical instruction set to gfx1030, so export HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=10.3.0 should work perfectly if you're using the AMD binaries. Or you can build from source for gfx1033, but that's probably more painful than necessary.
The one catch is that the Steam Deck is currently using Linux 5.13, which predates a lot of bug fixes. I was noticing bugs while using the upstream kernel when packaging ROCm for Debian until something like Linux 5.19. My test case for the Steam Deck was rocRAND, which passed most of its tests. I would expect the rest to pass with a newer kernel, though I haven't verified that.
tl;dr: ROCm is not packaged for easy installation on all the platforms you might want to use it on, but it appears that the hardware works and the software exists.
But the dockability makes it pretty damn awesome. you can code in first class style by docking it with a monitor and keyboard, and then when you leave you can take it with you and get a great portable game player or movie watcher or web browser with good battery life. the built in screen is pretty good. I was impressed
But it's pretty lightweight and handles games well, so if I go on trips somewhere, sometimes I just bring the Deck + small keyboard to do emergency fixes on, and for that, it works very well.
Full KDE desktop based on Arch (/ is read-only by default, but this can be disabled)
it Really shines when plugged into external monitors/dock. In particular, I have a couple USB-C displays that provide usb-hubs - I plug a single usb-c cable into the top of the thing and have a great little mini-workstation machine.
Does 4k displays just fine and is very responsive for the size. It's basically replaced the linux laptop I would drag along on trips. If I need a workstation it suffices, and I can plug it into hotel room tvs really easily to watch whatever I want.
Basically - hard to argue with the value proposition given it only costs $500 and I get a great little portable workstation. That fact that it does an excellent job with games is just cream on top.
Honestly a laptop makes a lot more sense in general for that still. You just pull it out and everything you need is there. But if the versatility of the device is appealing to you then it might make more sense. I have used it for traditional computing with a keyboard/mouse and portable monitor, but it is quite cumbersome to do so. But I value it much more and primarily as a portable games system. As an aside, the trackpads are great and for me the thing that sets it apart from any of the similar systems, but in desktop mode they aren't nearly as good or useful by comparison. Though it might be possible to change the way they work in desktop mode but the basic way it hooks input by default makes them pretty dumb trackpads.