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Has anyone managed to use their Steam Frame with an external monitor? (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 hours ago by to c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
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This is stupid and not really a use case since I guess I could technically hook into the Steam Frame's desktop mode via some sort of Steam Link shenanigans if I really wanted to, but since the steam frame's selling point was "This is a standalone Linux machine!" I kinda want to see if I could actually use it as a standalone Linux machine.

I tried the naive approach of just plugging it into a monitor via HDMI to USB-C dongle, but the monitor did not show up or react in any way. There isn't even a "Displays" setting in the KDE Settings menu at all :o
I found some random thread about the Steam Deck that said external monitors are disabled unless you set your device to "Boot into desktop mode" so I tried that and it still didn't work.

My second attempt was trying to get Displaylink Drivers installed because those are needed for the Docking station I have (StarTech DK31C4DPPDUE). Disabled Read-Only Mode, failed to install paru due to some sort of rustc incompatibility, then managed to install pikaur (whatever that is) and through that the displaylink and evdi-dkms package.

The Guide on the Arch Wiki says to configure DKMS but I just couldn't figure out how to do that. So the displaylink service kept failing to start due to some sort of kernel error, as expected.

Honestly, I'm kinda stupid so I'm all out of ideas on how to get this running. I'm also probably too annoyed from today to interact with my Frame for at least a week.

spoilerUgh, I spent like an hour trying to figure out how to click Ctrl on the frame keyboard because I borked my pacman.conf file but couldn't save changes that would fix it because I couldn't press Ctrl and the only Virtual Keyboard available via Discover just didn't work and the only other solution I found online was to install a different virtual keyboard via pacman but my pacman didn't work because I borked the .conf file... I relented and plugged a physical keyboard into the frame.

Has anyone had any more luck? Please also tell me about other stupid things to do with the Frame.

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[–] 4 points 2 hours ago (3 children)

I’m wondering why you want to do this? Is it just so other people can see what the user is seeing?

I do not have a frame ($ plus I already have vr) but I can usually just see the game I’m playing on the tv that is already hooked up to the pc. Also, if you have this setup you can usually go into your display settings and duplicate the chosen screen and the vr goggles should count as one?

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 2 hours ago (1 child)

    My hope was that I could just plug the frame into my dock and use it as a little standalone desktop with monitor and mouse/keyboard. I've been fiddling with a bit of VR game development these past few days and thought that it might be neat to write code right inside the Frames desktop (my usual IDE runs totally fine in there) so that it's instantly accessible and I don't need to upload or stream my code to the headset.
    It's not much of a problem to do that of course, but if it did work completely standalone it would be such a cool and simple way to let people try programming. I sometimes supervise student interns at work and making a little VR thing would be a super interesting task for them.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 hours ago

    One use I can think of is Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes, I played that on a Vive like ten years ago and it needed one screen to run on the headset (for the bomb-handler) and one to run on the desktop (for the instruction-reader). Having other people see what you're seeing is probably a much more common use case though!

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