Okay so there are three fundamental problems with the "cyberdeck'
-
the term came from a specific william gibson book (or a couple i don't remember) where it was not actually described except in vague terms. by all rights every cyberdeck should be different, but instead it seems like they're mostly apeing a couple specific references to i don't know what
-
whatever they're apeing, the ergonomics are dog shit. "keyboard in same plane as screen" is an unusable waste of silicon, end of story, no discussion.
-
the original gibson definition, and frankly the only one i respect, is that the cyberdeck is a heavily modified version of an off-the-shelf product, and (implicitly, imo) a shitty, older one that's all the hacker could afford, which has been patched and upgraded and kitbashed for years
thus: the actual cyberdeck - the one that fits the spiritual definition and text definition, and which is actually ergonomic and useful - is a dell latitude e6410 laptop with an i7 3rd gen swap, 16GB of RAM, a 2TB SSD, two USB3 express cards, a 1080p panel out of a different model machine, and a power supply soldered directly to the motherboard. and, to wit, that thing exists, and there are people using them as envisioned.
I honestly have no idea what the use case is for these cyberdecks that people make. Part of me wants to think it's people goofing around with colors and form factors, that they serve mainly as art projects that also happen to run linux or something, and that's fine if that's the case. But something about it makes me think that no, these folks making these things see them as actually useful devices somehow, and I really hope that's just me misunderstanding things
