I reserved a Deck day one within a minute and I think I might be in the initial launch (still no expected ship date listed though the payment processed and I got the confirmation email within a couple minutes). Whenever I get it, I’m hyped.

I’m not a typical user. I do enjoy handheld games, but I also am an Arch Linux user (btw), I deploy servers, I write code, blah blah blah. My current personal computer is an old T430, and I plan to use my deck as a daily driver as a desktop at home, a media center on the couch, handheld in bed, and a tablet on the go. To meet those use cases I plan to do a custom Arch install.

Is anyone else planning on doing something similar?

Some things I’m starting to plan out are:

  • Some sort of custom lockscreen that can use the deck controls to unlock or an onscreen keyboard.
  • E-reader mode
  • Audio mode
  • Kodi for media center and plex
  • RetroArch for retro games
  • Steam (of course)
  • Removal of telemetry and possibly iptable rules to block Steam telemetry if any
  • Graphical interface to do basic maintenance tasks without a keyboard (like a script launcher window). This could probably be the app launcher in gnome with some custom desktop entries