Personal data is the new ‘oil’

A Thunderbolt cable will handle the required bandwidth from the dock to the laptop.

Your phone, do you expect to pass data via the phone and your laptop (eg photos/videos?) If you do then a USB 3.2 10 Gbps cable would be the most you would need (€25), costs may stear you towards a simple charging cable something around 60w (€10) would be ample BUT you phone may not fast charge due to Samsung’s charging preference.

HDMI 2.1 would be ample for a your monitor (4k resolution at 120fps) and the cost difference between this (€13) and 2.0 (€10) is minimal nowerdays

Ethernet is easy, CAT5e in the colour/length of your choice would supply the potential max 2.5gb Ethernet port you have (€8 for 10meters). Higher the CAT rating the more costly the cable.

Additional Thunderbolt ports would be best used/reserved for high-speed external storage or even a gaming GPU.

The fact your asking about these items shows you should be pretty much covered for the next few years of ‘fitire proofing’

I’ve seen these items around and never considered them and proceeded to buy a USB C dock instead. Your comment about a ‘single’ item to pack hits home well and considering one for my TV setup.

What length of USB C cable do you use from your charger to your Deck? I’m thinking I may need to be around 3 meters away.

Running DVB-S2 for many years and SAT>IP (think of it as Satellite decoding to rstp) seems to be the way. I’ve not thought about a smaller PC to host my current card and welcome your suggestion. I’d github’d minisatip a few weeks ago and the penny didn’t drop!

I had planned to go for an Enigma2 based device and go from there.

DSP is a game I would love in the Deck. I can imagine it would be difficult to manipulate. I thought about trying to use the Gyro to aid movement in some way but never tried.

I did spend around 4 hours overall on Shapez

https://shapez.io/

Local saves only from the non Steam version though.

I’ve always been too lazy to look up the reason for the change of name. Today I did: https://www.linux.com/news/ethereal-changes-name-wireshark/

TLDR: Authors previous employer trademarked the Ethereal name on the Authors behalf, the author moved jobs and couldn’t negotiate the transfer to him - thus Wireshark was born.

Thanks for this clear detail.

Are you able to advise what recommendations you would suggest for the Steam Deck.

From memory a U3 card is recommended in the size of our choice?

High quality post, thanks for sharing.

For more related history try out the following book: Dealers of Lightning Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age By Michael A. Hiltzik