You may become spoiled by the Steam Deck's excellent controls, such that no gamepad currently for sale will ever come close.

For me and Rimworld, I became dependent on the four back buttons, and now I can't stand playing it on desktop with a controller because no controller on the market offers four additional buttons that work like that (as far as I know)

Get the 1TB with the etched screen if you’re considering it. It looks fantastic, and works great when not indoors. Like, in a car or airplane for example. I was debating between it and the 512GB because I often prefer a glossy screen, but the effect is small yet mighty.

Also, get Moonlight on your Steam Deck and Apollo on your PC. You can stream games from your PC with Apollo to Moonlight at much higher quality than Steam’s own streaming system. I send 1440p to my deck so after chroma subsampling I get fully defined 1280x720 pixels. It looks significantly better than just sending 1280x720 or 1280x800 to the Deck.

And finally, pick up Geometry Wars 3. It’s like the perfect pick-up-and-put-down game for the Deck.

The OLED has a bunch of upgrades over the base model that aren't obvious. It's really worth the splurge.

Other than that, don't get too caught up in the hyperbole and expect to play things mostly up to the PS3/360 generation AAA and indies. Newer games will run sometimes but it's often not worth the hassle. There are exceptions, particularly in games that have specific issues in other platforms, but... you know, it's a 3 year old handheld, keep your expectations in check.

Depending on our use case, one of the newer 3rd party SteamOS handhelds may be a better option. Steam Deck does not ramp up performance when connected to a power source, for example. OTOH, if your use case is mainly portable with long battery life (so not ramping up performance by spending more energy), the performance difference to the newer devices is non existent any more, even skewed slightly towards the Deck.

Do yourself a favor and get the OLED model. The OG Deck's LCD screen is really bad by today's standards. The OLED screen and the dual touchpads are the two features that still stand out compared to the more recent competition. I don't use the touchpads that often, though. For me personally, there are no must haves.

Finding a good USB-C Hub for your needs is a good thing to know before purchasing if you want it docked at all. Whether the official steam deck dock suits your needs, or a third-party hub on any tech website you can find.

Don’t buy it for AAA games. It thrives on AA and indie games, but AAA games will suck the battery like crazy (on the original model, at least) and you’ll be lucky to get 60 frames on any AAA games from the last few years.

Look at the games you want on Steam and verify they'll work to your satisfaction.

Go OLED if you can, grab a 1tb sdcard for storage expansion. Watch a few people tweak the settings of a game and the graphics card. You can force lower settings and make a game have higher fps and much longer battery life and not really see a loss in graphics due to the smaller screen. Also watch a few tutorials on tweaking steam controller settings. So you can pick up some rando game that's built for kb/m and make it work nice with a controller. Especially gyro, FPS games are more fun being able to gyro the crosshairs a little for micro movements like targeting the head.

Also once you get it, play Aperature Desk Job. It's free, and is a nice 30min tutorial of your deck.

Simple stuff to prevent you from panicking early on:

• Say you're playing docked with an external controller and you put your steam deck to sleep while playing a a game. After it wakes up the next time you use it, 99% of the time, the game won't respond to the controller input anymore. You need to reorder the controllers in the menu and it'll come good again. Only in extremely rare cases have I had to restart the game.
• Less so now, but early on there were definitely cases where I had to power cycle the steam deck because something went wrong. Even if the screen is black for a bit, just give it some time.
• There's years of tips/tricks or software mods that people have collected that may/may not be relevant anymore. Just play it for a week or two before tweaking things. For instance, I love Decky loader for adding things like protondb support and how long to beat times to the library... but you definitely don't need it.

If you do decide to play docked, Sony Dualshock 4 or Dualsense 5 controllers are great because they have touchpads. This makes them super useful in games with half implemented controller support (i.e. the games work fine but the menu controls still use a mouse) or using desktop mode from the couch. They also have gyro support too.

I haven't had many issues with PC usb-c hubs... but all hubs are created differently. If you care about 4K output, VRR, HDR or anything above basic usage, I found a dedicated jsaux docking station works pretty well (note: I never considered the official dock as it was only officially available in my country well after I already had a steam deck).

As others have said, spring for the OLED at the lowest storage tier, refurbished if you want to save a few extra dollars and have patience.

The ssd upgrade is easy to do and on the wallet. Another minor upgrade I'd suggest are PlayVital back button covers...makes those a lot easier to use.

If you're comfortable changing an m.2 SSD in a standard laptop, then working on the steam deck isn't much different. My advice is buying the lowest storage SD and then buying an aftermarket 2TB.

But also be aware that gameplay on SD cards is also very performative, so you may not need that extra storage anyway.

Sleep takes battery even if nothing is running. It's big so if you will play only steam deck for a while after that every controller would feel small and nintendo switch would feel like baby toy.

Many oled models have serious audio issues. Speakers and bt audio work fine, but the 3.5 mm jack is noisy. If this happens, you open a ticket right away, send it back and they will replace sound board for you. I got mine done. It's better, but not perfect.

It comes with a free Portal-universe game that teaches you how all the controls work. It's fun. Play it immediately. It will teach you that the thumbsticks are capacitive. Turns out that's a useless feature, so just get some nice thumbstick caps that make them larger, more rubbery, and more comfortable.

I highly recommend a 180° USB-C adapter to use the power cord while playing. It makes the cord angle down instead of up, which feels more natural. Plus, I feel like it would be gentler on the cord and USB-C port if the cord got tugged hard when plugged into an adapter instead of directly into the Steam Deck.

Plus, with a 180° adapter, you can keep the Deck in it's case while charging. Normally you can't do this because the top of the Steam Deck faces the hinge of the case. But the adapter fits in the case OK and reroutes the wire downward. It definitely raises the deck up slightly, but you can still zip the case halfway closed. I do this because I live in a very small apartment with a high chance of knocking or spilling something onto the Steam Deck if I were just to leave it laying around.

Fun fact: the touch pads don't actually click when you press them like a button, but you will swear they do! The haptic feedback mechanism is incredibly good.

Major Overheating Issue

I don't know how this is not a more widely complained-about problem.

I paired a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller to my deck, played a game, then put the deck in its case while asleep. (You tap the power button and the deck goes to sleep.) Well, apparently, "Wake on Bluetooth" is enabled by default and you can't turn it off! So, I threw my Nintendo Switch controller in a drawer, and of course a button got hit. It woke up my Steam Deck in it's case. I had a game running, so the Steam Deck starts rendering the game and creating a lot of heat that is just being circulated within the case by the fan. The Deck got insanely hot!

I noticed it sometime later only because I heard it make a sound. When I took it out, I used my infrared thermometer to measure the back of the deck, and it was over 140° F. Uncomfortable to touch! It would have sat there for hours like that if I hadn't noticed.

Solution: I had to install the Decky Loader plugin system in order to install a plugin that disables Wake on Bluetooth. I still don't see any way to disable it without using Decky. Decky is pretty great though, and it has tons of cool plugins. Of course, you could also just turn off Bluetooth before putting this Steam Deck in its case, but if you forget, it'll be a problem.

Buy a nice case for transporting it. I like my JSAUX case, it has alot more storage space then the stock case.

Getting your games from Epic and GoG to work on it takes a bit of work but overall not complicated.

Also if you use an external controller, sometimes it will show the wrong platform glyphs. Personally I just deal with it while using a PS controller but you can just have it show generic ones if you prefer that.

The LCD model is not compatible with wifi 6 :(

Don't set charge limits, because odds are you can never get back to 100% battery charging ever again due to bugs (at best I get 99% now.)

Don't expect your games to "just work" - even if they have a green check box, expect to have to troubleshoot like you always have, almost certainly even more.

Memorize Steam button + X to open the keyboard, you're gonna need it.

Don't go anywhere without a charger unless you're playing a game that you know will last long on battery.

The more games you install, the more games you won't play. A giant SD card and a giant SSD just means you have more shit that you look at and feel guilty before you power it off because you can't decide what to play anyway (and that's a big factor for why our backlogs have been growing all this time even before getting a deck. Too many games, not enough time and motivation.)

Know that a USB-C dock is gonna have issues. You're gonna have to fuck with audio output settings each and every time you connect it, and sometimes when you resume it from sleep. It will not always gracefully recover when you unplug it either.

There's gonna be a refresh to the hardware before you know it, and you're gonna want that version.

It's too big to fit in your pocket, you basically need a backpack for it.

You won't need any kind of case, but a glass screen protector is a good idea.

The bottom plastic near the screws will crack from stress. It happens even moreso on the transparent model.

Expect very poor control schemes on any game that is not incredibly popular with official gamepad support. If you are patient and can setup the keybinds yourself you can do OK- but some games just don't work well with a controller, period.

Sleep mode drains battery like a motherfucker. It seemed great on release, but now I lose what feels like 20% a day, or more. This means the deck you set down Sunday night will almost certainly be dead by Saturday when you get back to it.

Games that have poor save schemes like what has been found in older RPGs can be frustrating to deal with, because if you pause your session and come back to it... you still need to grind to the next save point or lose your progress. This is in a non-issue in tons of games, but can be an issue sometimes.

Some games sync in-game settings to the cloud, and overwrite what you have on your deck or PC depending on what was last used.

If you use an SD card, sometimes it can take minutes to hours to provision the storage necessary to begin downloading and installing the game on said SD card. This is after it's properly formatted, no matter how many games have been installed and how much space is free. It's a great mystery.

There's hotkey combinations to turn up and down brightness. If you hold down the steam key long enough, it shows you many more of those combinations to do many more useful things.

When you're changing settings in a game, you can specify changing global settings or hit a slider to make it per-game profile. It's almost always better to change per-game profiles so your settings can be custom per game.

You can remote play on a ps5 incredibly well. Chiaki4deck is great.

Your GOG, Epic and other games do not work easily natively. There are fan projects like Heroic Games Launcher to have this functionality, but they aren't native to the system.

It's very easy to not have any of your steam playtime register with steam.

It's very easy for your steam playtime to suddenly display dozens or hundreds of hours from sleep mode being utilized in some games.

That's just what I can mention from personal experience.

1. Changing the SSD was easy and a big cost savings. I bought the cheapest model and upgraded to 512GB because at the time it was a huge price spike to go up to 1TB. My understanding now is that 1TB, or even 1.5TB, makes a lot more sense. Maybe even 2TB, though they are still a lot.

2. This applies to PC gaming in general, but even moreso for the Deck. The question is not "will it run?"- it is incredibly rare to find any game that simply will not run at all. The questiona are: how well does it run, and how much am I willing to sacrifice to get there? If you want, you can download Aperture Desk Job for free and play through the whole thing in one sitting. It's incredibly easy to install on a stock Deck with just a couple of button presses, all the controls are mapped perfectly, and it's designed to look and run great on a Deck. Other games will be more complicated.

I recently went to play Baldur's Gate 3 with a friend. It's Verified, but the experience just sucks. It installed just fine, and since it knows it's on Deck it handles the annoying Larian launcher thing fine. But even when I cranked all of the visual settings to their lowest and limited the Deck to 30FPS, it was still playing the game with the fan on max, loudly blasting hit air out. I think the battery life was less than an hour. The 720p screen really does the game poorly, and the controller UI is... Impressive, but still nowhere near as good as M&KB.

Skyrim is another example. Runs pretty well once you're in there, but there's an annoying splash screen first. So you need to either go into the launch options to turn it off (but that's the only way to adjust the visual settings to make sure you do that first), or just leave a track pad as a mouse (including press-to-click) for that game so you can click past the splash screen and go back to controller mode. Or just use the touch screen if you prefer.

Everything is a balance. Battery life, fan noise, heat, resolution, visual post-processing, frame rate. It's subjective, and you may want to play a game differently when you're on your couch vs when you're on a plane, for example.

3. Streaming. You can use the Deck similar to how devices like the PS Portal or Logitech G-Cloud are supposed to work. If you have a gaming desktop, you can install Valve's Steam Link app (it's not in Steam though - you need to go to desktop mode, go to the Discover repository to find and install it, then add it to Steam as a non-Steam game). Then after some setup, you can stream from your desktop to the Deck. This is a great workaround for heavy modern AAA games. Gigantic games that are hundreds of gigabytes can live on cheaper 2.5"SSD's this way. If your desktop runs windows this gets around anh OS comparability issues Proton can't handle, and it might get around some anticheat too. The computation is shifted of the deck, so the fan stays quiet, the unit stays cool, and battery life is great. The downside is a bit of lag.

I've heard of NVIDIA's Moonlight and the community-made AMD version Sunshine as well. But I think Nvidia has stopped their support, and personally I never even got Sunshine to install on my desktop. Steam Remote Play has dramatically improved over the years and is say it's pretty good now.

Sony has their official PS Remote Play app for Windows and Android that allows those devices to steam from PS4's and PS5's. I assume this is what the PS Portal uses too. There is no official app for Linux, but there is a 3rd party one called Chiaki. You can also install this as a non-Steam game and stream. I'm playing Bloodborne on the Deck on my porch right now as I'm taking this.

4. Advanced Savings. I have a ton of emulators and a library of ROMs. I also have my desktop and like to use it to stream to a variety of different screens, and unfortunately you can't use Steam Cloud Saves with non-Steam games, or even with some Steam games like Retroarch. Even some of my Steam games don't have cloud save support- I was shocked to open up Sonic Adventure 2: Battle on the Deck and see an empty save.

The solution? Syncthing. Install this app on your Deck as a non-Steam game. Install it on your desktop, your android TV box, your phone, your old laptop, your NAS. Whether it's backups or synchronization, it's great. I'll catch a Pokemon on my Deck in an emulator, save, move to my desktop, open the save using PKHex, make the pokemon Shiny, then go back to the Deck and enjoy my new shiny pokemon.

5. File Sharing. Assuming you have a desktop, set up an SMB shared folder there. On the Deck in Desktop mode, you might need to install an app with more advanced file browsing features than the default (I like one called Nautilus). This one I only use in Desktop mode, so no need to add it to the Steam Library. It's just great to be able to offload storage for my Deck onto my desktop, especially for larger disc-based ROM's. PS2, GameCube, PS3, Wii, WiiU, and Switch games all fall into this category because I either have large libraries or the games themselves are just huge. A 512GB card is probably enough for the entire library of ROM's for every pre-2000 videogame. Heck, you could probably get away with 256GB if you use good compression formats. Once we start using DVD's and Blue-Rays those sizes increase fast. My library is already on mechanical drives on my desktop (one of these days I'll build a proper server) so it's nice to be able to copy over the handful of games I feel like I'm going to want to play soon over the network, no messing with cables or flash drives or SD cards or anything.

If you're into cosmetics the only way (that I'm aware of) to get the fancy Steam profile stuff and special keyboards is to buy the 1TB version. If you're interested in customising your Deck with themes, intro videos and the like the 1TB version is the way forward as space gets eaten up quickly.

It's worth buying a screen protector and a small, fine paintbrush to dust out the grooves and vents.

Enjoy your Deck!

You might want to upgrade your couch & TV. If you’re used to playing at a desktop, it doesn’t feel right to play a handheld in your gaming chair. You can plop down in a big comfortable couch, put on a TV show or movie in the background, and grind through whatever game you like that runs decent.

It’s good for when someone else wants to watch a tv show you don’t care about, so you pop out your deck and spend time together doing separate things that interest you.

Remember your admin password if you mess around on the Linux side.