Pi 5 - 8gb/16gb

So I've been thinking about making a cyber deck as a everyday use and development platform, because I have an old unused slightly broken SteamDeck, but after tinkering with it to try and flash Ubuntu on it, it seems significantly more broken than I thought it was.

I'll watch for a replacement mainboard on Ebay to fix it, but they are like hens-teeth. I've also emailed Steam support to see if there's any way they will sell me one but I'm not holding out and hope.

But that does not reduce the need for a development platform, because I've been using a OLED SteamDeck as my everyday use computer and it's broadly fine, but it has a couple of things that blocks the use of which is why using the old SteamDeck with Ubuntu or similar was so appealing.

The first and main issue is that the operating system that works best on a SteamDeck is a locked down variant like the main SteamOS (built on Arch) or Bazzite (built on Fedora Blue). Both of these clamp significant areas of the operating system down as then the Deck still functions well as a games console and as I want to still be able to play games on it I've been having to work around this constraint.

As I get more and more low level in the things I'm developing on such as MicroPython on RPI 2040 or the Daisy Seed, they require more and more tooling for the build chain being directly implemented into the OS (either direct hardware access such as rw for /dev/usbserial ports or being able to install dependant libraries at a low level) and it's becoming increasingly difficult to manage to embed these into the Steam Decks OS without moving too far away from it's core ethos.

So I need a different, completely open platform to develop on.

I already have a 7" capacitative touchscreen designed to mount a Raspberry Pi onto, I'm extremely familiar with Raspberry Pi's and managing Raspbian so I think a natural step right now is to get a Raspberry Pi5, either the 8 or 16gb variant and mount that on the back of the screen and use this as the development platform I'm severely missing. Raspberry Pi's have dual HDMI ports, so I'll be able to use my usual rig of second screen to my main desk monitor etc so viewing on the 7" will be similar as the SteamDeck, I'll use that screen for quick lookup stuff and terminals.

The other things I'm thinking about is a potential M2 NVME PI hat so I can have the main OS on the 256 or 1tb NVME 2350 drives I already have, that will definitely help with day-to-day performance. Maybe I'll add a beefy battery so it can move around as a mobile compute, but I'm guarded on how big that pack would need to be to be usable, might be worth some research to understand the benefits for it.

This could end up being the cyber deck I was thinking of with tear-off keyboard, tear-off usb ports etc, but if I don't make a start somewhere I'll never know what works for me.