Can I use a steam deck to code things for my steam deck?
Yes! You could even download Godot from the steam store for free and it will always be kept updated to the latest version. Same for Blender!
Just adding to this for other people that don’t know: you can also install most* standard Linux applications and tools on SteamOS, as long as it’s available as a Flatpak, or you can install it to your user directory. Technically, you can even bypass that last caveat and install whatever you want, but you’re going to have a bad time if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Alternatively, you can install any Linux distro on your Steam Deck if game dev isn’t a good experience for you on SteamOS. In fact, Bazzite is working on a GDX (Game Developer eXperience) edition, and will likely be a solid choice once it’s ready.
However, since currently the Godot launcher is bundled together with the Godot Engine version and all that updates together, late in development of a project you’d want to avoid auto updates since it may break your project at unfortunate times by introducing feature incompatibilities though feature depreciation or regression bugs that causes issues for your game.
- get a dock
- attach keyboard and mouse on the dock and connect the dock to a monitor
- go into desktop mode on your Steam Deck
- open up Discover and install applications
Basically a full fledged PC. There are some limitations, but for the most part you are able to code on it. You can write text and source code files, edit videos, edit images, browse the web with regular Firefox and so on. I can’t say if the Steam Deck works well creating games with Godot, but technically it shouldn’t stop you from trying.
AFAIK a Steam Deck is a full Linux PC, so you can do anything on it that you can do on a Linux PC, including that. Whether this will be especially convenient is a different question.
