Today, I finally received my Steam Deck. That's where the trouble began.
But let me start at the beginning; my current setup is a bit convoluted. My main PC is a laptop connected to all its peripherals (mouse, keyboard, speakers, microphone and two monitors) via an USB-C dock. This system solely runs Linux (I'm not telling you that because running Linux is cool, mhm, but because this part will be important later in the story). As this is not very useful for playing games, let alone that the laptop does not even have an GPU, I setup my old desktop to serve as a Cloud Play station. It sits under my desk and is connected via two cables; power and ethernet. Thanks to this, I'm able to stream Windows games via Steam to my laptop. So far so good.
Now this 'gaming' PC slowly but surely stops supporting games with its Intel Core i5-2550K and EVGA GTX770. It also got some whopping 16 gigs of DDR3.
Now Valve came up with some new technology called Steam Deck which should handle games quite well. I saw this as an opportunity to finally upgrade my gaming hardware without spending all too much money; I'm not playing as much as I used to do so massive financial investments are not really viable.
So the theory of Konschti 2021 was:
- Thinkpad connects via USB-C
- Steam Deck connects via USB-C
- My monitors work on the Thinkpad
- My monitors will work on the Steam Deck
Testing has shown that 4 was a wrong assumption.
After switching to the beta branch on the Steam Deck as maybe dock support was recently added was a wrong ruse, I thought about updating the dock too. Now for the all too important part about Linux; apparently there are not enough users of ThinkPad docks on Linux to warrant fwupdmgr support. Additionally, the firmware update for the dock is only available as an .exe file. Also a dead end for Linux.
So that is where we are at right now; the next steps will be to borrow a Windows laptop from one of my work colleagues to run this .exe file to hopefully successfully update the dock which in turn hopefully now supports the Steam Deck. We will see.
Some time has passed…
Okay, after using three different laptops and receiving three different error messages while trying to flash the firmware, I've finally been able to update the firmware. Disabling the virus scanner on the last laptop did it. Now my dock is running the latest firmware you can download. Now for the result, drum roll please!
It did not work, the Steam Deck still will not recognise the monitor. I guess for now I have to wait until somebody, either at Lenovo or at Valve, decides to support the other hardware.
A year has passed...
Now it works. One day I connected it and it worked. Cannot remember the exact date but for now, I can play Barotrauma without any worries.