this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Interesting, but overall it seems to come down to basically just getting Ubuntu running on it, which of course works as steam OS is also just a Linux distro. And from there you can do all types of things. Programming wouldn't be my choice though. But as a mobile introspection device maybe. How would it compare with a tablet? Does it have advantages?
Yes, I believe it has plenty advantages in using the steam deck vs android tablets. Instead of installing Ubuntu on my Steam Deck, I utilize Podman and Podman Compose to launch the necessary ROS nodes.
My Steam Deck records compressed RGB+D and LiDAR data into rosbags, while running a LOAM-based algorithm and visualizing the map in real-time. During this process, the CPU usage remains around 70%. The primary consumer of system resources was Chrome, (running Foxglove), which accounted for approximately 17% of CPU usage. This leaves room to experiment with more resource-intensive algorithms (which I will be doing in the future). I think I could not have managed this in a tablet for the price of the Steam Deck.
The presence of joysticks on the Steam Deck proves useful for utilizing it as a controller, another benefit versus using an Android tablet. Although I have not yet messed with the joysticks, only with the back buttons to add a few keybindings.
What display server does steam use on Arch/SteamOS? Wayland, X11? I imagine you're using Foxglove with native browser install to work around the hassle of having to do display forwarding and GPU passthrough from the container to use rViz instead?
It uses X11. I am using Foxglove on a container and exposing a port. I didn't tried Rviz, but it probably is not straightforward to make it work. So I went directly to a web-based viewer.