Perhaps the best use of the Steam Deck Docking station is for multiplayer games. Again, I use my own personal computer for browsing the web, writing or working on other projects, but in this case, a bigger screen, with a mouse and keyboard enables the Steam Deck to be a desktop Linux machine The monitor aspect actually works better for a totally different aspect of the Steam Deck: the Linux KDE Plasma desktop. Soul Calibur VI, Stray and other games I've been playing on the Steam Deck looked worse when stretched across my 28-inch computer monitor than on the Steam Deck's 7-inch, 1280 x 800 screen. But if this is your only gaming PC, it does work That being said, the dock doesn't add any graphics power to the Steam Deck. For me, someone with a gaming desktop, I don't think plugging into a monitor is the best experience. Its custom AMD Zen 2 'Van Gogh' APU and eight RDNA 2-based compute units are potent enough, but they don't have the specs to blow up these games to a large screen. The Steam Deck's specs are meant for gaming on the go. I recently finished all of Stray that way.

But I like using the Steam Deck to curl up on the couch and play games on the build-in controls. For me, it's a very nice place to stick the Steam Deck to charge.

Here's the longer version: in most cases, I wouldn't use the Docking Station.

When I plugged in my Keychron Q1, pulled mouse dongles and wired controllers out and tried them, they worked.

Valve steam deck windows