I use my Deck for gaming, but one of the things I like most about it is the ways it can be used that are slightly off the beaten track. I think it’s a pretty established principle that a lot of us enjoy setting new stuff up on our machines more than actually using it, and I was wondering what tricks I’m missing out on. So here’s a list of the things I’ve added to my deck apart from the stock “play steam game hurr durr” functionality, and I’d love to hear any that other people have added to theirs.

• Emby - There’s a good Emby client that’ll run in console mode, that plays music, TV and movies from my Emby server (a raspberry pi) plugged into my NAS.
• Spotify - I was surprised to find that there’s a Spotify client that works, again, very happily in game mode if you add it as a non-steam application. And because it’s non-steam, you can run it as a separate application parallel to a game and play music at the same time.
• Podcast player - there’s a pretty decent podcast player in Discover that can be added to Steam to play in console mode. Again, can run parallel to a game. (Damnit, this one’s stopped launching. Might need updating, might have broken.)
• Emulation - this one’s pretty well published already, but EmuDeck is, once you get past a few quirks, a great way to get non-PC games running on your deck; it’s amazing how well Switch games run on it. And it feels scandalous to have my Switch library available without the cartridge or carrying another machine. Feels like it’s for my convenience, not just the company’s legal preferences, you know? And yes, I mean my library, my Switch games are legal YES THEY ARE SHUT UP.
• Heroic games launcher - very cool to have this unified library of GoG, Prime and Epic freebies available on my Deck, for much the same reason as above - just lovely to have it doing what I want it to, not just what meets the interests of the platform that vended the software to me.
• Itch.io - There’s an Itch client. This kinda amazed me, and having that many weird, tiny games for train journeys and such is a lovely concept.
• Microsoft GFWL - This is way easier to get working than people had led me to believe, and Microsoft has actually put a guide together for it. You need the top-tier subscription at about ten bucks a month, and it’s streaming, but hey, it cost me twenty dollars to find out Starfield is boring instead of sixty. Good times.
• VPN / Samba sharing - Speaking of my NAS, it was pretty easy to set up a VPN between my router and my deck (and laptop for that matter) so everywhere I go, I’m on my home network if I need to be. That makes my NAS and incidental junk storage available at a minute’s notice so I can leave… large files, I don’t know what they might be, let’s say it’s a gigabyte database file for work - downloading on P2P at home and drag them into my Deck from the other side of the country when I’m staying with relatives.
• Music Synth - There’s a couple of very cool gizmos for making music - one of which being Korg’s actual literal Gizmo for Switch - available to the Deck. I’ve got Gizmo and Rytmik already, I’d love recommendations if anyone knows any others.

Any other suggestions?