Firefox, Armcord, Freetube. The council awaits.

Absolutely agree! It’s especially great for small spaces and I can even use it while walking around if I need to!

What model is it, if I may?

Glad you could convert your partner to “the way”! I’ve always wondered if it’s less wear and tear or not. I’ve been using mine for decades now (daily…) and I’ve yet to have any problems.

First time I’ve heard of ploopy! I’m due to replace my current trackball and this is extremely tempting!

An OS can't run on a desktop environment bud. SteamOS is the operating system, and kde is a desktop environment that's installed on top of the OS

The "start button" is the kde plasma logo. So this would be Linux of some sort (makes sense given the community and what OP has said) and not windows

The question is just whether OP is using steamOS that comes on the deck (and uses KDE plasma for desktop mode) or if they have installed a different distro that fits the desktop use case a bit better.

Wrong.

This is KDE Plasma, look at the bottom left corner.

Tbh it also fooled me initially, KDE Plasma does look very similar to win10. I had to read the community and look at the Plasma icon rather than Windows icon to see.

Start making rounds at companies near you. I haven't paid for a laptop, desktop, server, monitors or ssds in nearly a decade. I pop in, ask if they have any hardware that they need to get rid of. Most companies have to pay to get rid of techology, most of the time their IT department is happy to offload tech for free. You just have to be fine accepting things 5+ years old.

After enough time and making friends with the c-suite, I have a couple companies that just ring me when they have stuff they want to clear out to give me a chance to grab stuff before they recycle. It reduces their cost to recycle, so they are more than happy.

Monitors are cheap as hell right now. For the price of 9 Five Guys burgers you can get a pretty good one at Walmart.

Hard agree. As someone who used to use a regular wired trackball but had to switch because laptop, I absolutely love it, despite it being a battery operated mouse.

You can even keep the original OS and just install dev tools via distrobox. That's what I do. It even comes pre-installed.

I have not actually tried it, bit Bazzite looks like it would be a perfect replacement for steamOS for those who want more out of their deck.