u/buffaloseven — buffaloseven

Thanks for the advice, everyone! I'm using `rsync` to back up my home directory on the Deck right now, and I've migrated a lot of my smaller games I'll want to have access to on both the Machine and Deck to a 256 GB microSD I had lying around (including my RetroDeck setup). I've also flashed the SteamOS installer onto a thumb drive.

I think I'll plan to just try putting the Deck SSD into the Steam Machine and see if it boots up and runs properly or not. If it looks like there's any issues, I'll just reinstall SteamOS on it and restore some of the files I'll want to from the backup external drive.

Then I'll do the same with the SM SSD in the SD, reinstall if anything's funky, and then copy files from the backup onto it again (though most of those will be mods and such for larger games that'll just live on the Steam Machine now, so it should be light work).

Just need to make sure to have a list of my Decky plugins in case I need to wipe things and make a list of the Flatpaks I've installed.

Oh, haha yes, you’re right. I meant swap. Obviously power everything down.

Just finishing up Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade on my Deck; it's been a blast. Once I wrap that up I'm probably going to tackle Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. On the side, I kind of constantly have Fallout 4 and Automobilista 2 going.

Beauty! I got my purchase e-mail for 512+Controller today, hopefully it’ll be here by the end of next week! I put a 1 TB SSD into my Steam Deck that I’m going to back up, format for the Steam Machine, and then swap the SM & SD drives so my SM is a 1 TB and my Deck is a 512. A bit of work but I’m looking forward to the end result!

Snagged one with little trouble, but I was early -- checked at XX:57 and the sale had gone live already, and I had put the money for it in my Steam Wallet last week as I wanted as few failure points as possible.

These things don't usually work out for me, so I have plenty of sympathy for those who got hung-up on the ordering page or just came a bit too late. For myself, I'm quite excited and it seems like it could even be here by the end of the week!

Great article. I've used my Steam Deck as a very capable desktop PC. I do about 85% of my work on an iPad I take around with me, but whenever I bump into more friction than I'd like with it, I just pop over to Desktop mode on my Steam Deck.

Flatpaks seem the future for Linux as they simply abstract away the dependency hell that can get less knowledgeable users in big trouble. Having used macOS/OS X for many years, user agents as an alternative to system daemons are familiar to me, but I didn't realize that SteamOS supported them; good to know!

I think that immutable operating systems are going to become more and more popular purely for the various security benefits that can come with them. Hopefully we continue to see the tools adapt to let us do more and more in user-space so we can get the benefits with few drawbacks.

Really, just get whatever peripherals you like. Don't expect to be able to do a lot of extra doodads since you won't be running any extra software to enable advanced features, so just get something you like that's comfortable.

I use the same keyboard and mouse I use with my primary computer: a Nuphy Air75 v2 keyboard and MX Master mouse.