I've been thinking about this for a while. With the repairability of the steam deck and the power available to it, it seems like a no brainer to use it for a bit of school work or casual browsing, Discord etc. Like you would a normal desktop.
There's a new product type popping up called LapDock that's basically a hollowed out laptop but often with a giant battery, UPerfect has one and as well as the NexDock and they seem promising.
My personal biggest gripe is screen resolution and colour accuracy, as well as battery life. As I also do photography colour accuracy would be a great plus for me and as for resolution, I've been using 2k and higher screens for years and going back to 1080p seems like a bit of a turn off. However, UPerfect has monitor only types but having to set that up ontop of a mouse and keyboard while out and about seems less than ideal in comparison to a laptop.
Any thoughts on this? Anyone who's tried it? Anyone who've tried desktop mode on high Res screens and seen any downsides, stutters, playback trouble, etc?
Edit:
I went out and bought myself a USB-C Hub with a PD port, HDMI and 2 USB to get a feel for the desktop experience on my TV at home. Since I do most of my work related things in Windows I installed it on a separate partition using GParted to shrink the home folder and then went through the Windows installer. After installing Valves drivers from their help page without errors everything seemed to work absolutely amazingly!
Everything from 4K playback to Windows animations all goes smoothly. It's a trouble free Windows installation which from my previous experiences is a nice change of pace. The only hiccups I can notice is the occasional stutter and some Windows feeling laggy when resizing and moving, mainly the settings window and other WinUI software with lots of detailing and graphics to them.
I tried installing Deathloop through Xbox Game Pass and that worked wonderfully too. It installed quickly and I tried setting the resolution to 4K and got a solid 15 FPS! I tried 1440p as well and got around 30 and then went to 1080p where I got around 45. Not quite enough for me as I get slight headaches when below 60 but good enough I feel like. In the end for gaming it doesn't really matter since I have handheld for that. Alternatively up-scaling.
As I've tried the Windows experience on the Steam Deck now I'm gonna continue my experimenting with SteamOS and see how that goes. My biggest issue so far has been that the USB-C Hub in Windows works perfectly at 4K 60Hz but SteamOS doesn't seem to be detecting the 60Hz mode at all when the screen is at 4K. I'm gonna troubleshoot and see what I can find. If anyone has had any similar issues and know how to resolve them any pointers would be greatly appreciated!
All in all the desktop experience on the Steam Deck is amazingly smooth. Truly feels like a proper Desktop when things are setup the way I need them to be and I couldn't be happier. The question for a laptop replacement is still in the air for me however. Now that I know that the desktop experience will be as smooth as it is I'm wondering which right way to go about it would be. As a lot of people in the comments on this thread and others mention that the build quality of the NexDock is absolutely terrible, a portable monitor seems to be the better way. I suppose in the end it would boil down to either living with bad build quality to get the more seamless experience. or chucking along a bluetooth mouse and keyboard with a portable monitor which could potentially not be too big of a hassle depending on how lazy I'm feeling during the days.
More thoughts would be welcome! Especially if there's any other users who have any experience with external displays and how they're using them!
I can weigh in on this - I've been using my Steam Deck docked and in desktop mode for about 6 months. The os is read-only, but you can switch it to RW... but that's the beginning of your troubles.
The latter got so bad, I ended up writing an Ansible playbook to make my recovery from upgrade easier: https://github.com/pezhore/steamdeck-developer
That's not including the annoyance of finding a monitor and dock (and charger) that will properly work with the deck.
TL;DR - you can use the steam deck as a workstation, but it's painful.
One other key office feature that's missing is printing. No cups support natively or via Flatpak.
Oh, that's a good one. I rarely have to print anything so I haven't run into that issue.
The read-only bit and updates causing packages to revert changes is kind of a big deal. I’ve rarely seen it mentioned or it is constantly glossed over.
I intend to install Windows on a separate partition so there I will most likely keep my school work and then use SteamOS for the gaming side of things. I think a Windows partition will mitigate most of your mentioned OS troubles.
The only thing I'd be wary of in that case is OS driver support. I don't have experience dual booting, nor with Windows support - but I'm sure other folks have gone that route.
Actually tried it just now, went out and got a USB-C hub and plugged it into my TV, least to say I'm pleasantly surprised even tho there's a tad of workarounds to get going. Basically just installed Steam and Valve's drivers from the steam website and it's pretty nice. Haven't tested gaming performance but wouldn't surprise me if it's lacking.