Hey all. I was looking for a dock online and noticed a decent amount of third party ones on ebay and Amazon. Anyone tried any, or know a good brand?
I don’t see myself playing on my TV much, just when I have friends over, so I can’t justify the cost of the name brand.
Most of the docks work perfectly well with the Steam Deck. However, there is one technical detail I would like to recommend people look into: DisplayPort and DisplayLink.
There are two methods to drive the display outputs (VGA, HDMI, or DisplayPort) for most docks: DisplayPort alt mode and DisplayLink. DisplayPort alt mode is what you want, and it’ll work flawlessly. It’s the go-to standard for display output over USB-C, Thunderbolt, or USB 4 in general.
DisplayLink is some weird technology developed by Synaptics to drive displays over USB 2 and up. It has a Linux driver, but that driver has tons of issues in my experience; it requires loading an external kernel module compiled from the AUR. With DisplayLink, the entire external screen is rendered by software, so this method comes with a huge hit to CPU resources.
Unless you have installed Windows onto your Deck, I would look exclusively for the DisplayPort capable docks.
Last I looked into them on windows (years ago now) they were very hacky there as well, and of course performed quite poorly. It has a few niche uses allowing you to use more monitors than you could use otherwise, especially on macs where last I checked MST wasn’t implemented but still it’s really a last resort option.
They’re suboptimal in any case, but at least they just work on Windows. I don’t know about Macs, maybe they need some kind of software installation too, but I’m sure the software is a lot easier to install than on Linux.