You know now that the Steam Deck is formidable gaming device (with more than 2000 games validated now), but since it’s designed to be open, it can be turned into a “steam deck laptop” as well, with the desktop mode and the fact that you can add flatpaks for pretty much any kind of application. Of course, a 800p screen is going to be of very limited use, but should be on the go and need something to do some ssh into a remote machine, or typing some kind of document or piece of code, the Steam Deck could fit the bill… as long as you have a proper keyboard attached to it.
As seen on Reddit, this is exactly what this setup could look like. A bluetooth keyboard made for holding a tablet like an iPad can prove to be the ideal kind of keyboard to hold the Steam Deck in position, as long as you have some extra plastic support attached on the Deck.
This is the typical use case for the Logitech K480 keyboard:
And this is what you can with the Steam Deck and a bit of 3D printing: the Steam Deck Laptop!
Pretty neat, huh?
The reddit user stevenpaulr has almost made the 3d model for the plastic support available so that anyone with a Deck can use their design, or iterate on it.
Well done. Looking forward to more mods and physical experiments around the Deck.
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It’s a good idea, but there is one reason that the “laptop” seems not too practical to me: the lack of a mouse in the photo, or at least the use of a bluetooth keyboard with a touchpad. As I see it, using the Steam Deck’s touchscreen or touchpads to double as the mouse seem to require too wide a gesture and also might dislocate the deck if done with some force. I still don’t have a Deck so I don’t know in practice how it manages devices, but I think a simple additional bluetooth mouse, if supported, would make… Read more »
Yes you can connect a BT mouse on the deck, so it should be an easy fix 🙂
Great idea. I remember, there were idea (on Kickstarter) of project to turn smartphones into laptop. You only put smartphone in special case and everything would work. Maybe there way to do the same with Steam Deck? And of course, with normal, big screen.
problem for the Deck is that it’s way too big to put in a case with a screen to turn it into a laptop, unless the case is really wide… 🙂