Steam Deck

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The LCD model is not compatible with wifi 6 :(

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.

So I got my steam deck as a late Christmas present and I loved mine. One thing I do in 3D games is set the R5 (right bottom back button) to A so I can play stuff like Deep rock or no man’s sky and be able to jump while still being able to look around

Both the back paddles and the trackpads have so much customization (and the normal buttons if you want) being able to bind them to normal controls like I did with the jumping thing. You can also create menus for the trackpads, I mostly use it on emulators with save/load state, full screen mode, some utilities

You can also make the buttons emulate pc controls, when I was feeling particularly insane I got planetside on my deck and mapped joysticks to WASD and mouse movement and triggers as mouse 1 and 2 with my left trackpad 1-9 for equipment

One thing I like to do in shooters is a half trigger pull only activates the trigger but a full trigger pull does trigger and activates gyro

The only exception is deep rock since right trigger is mine so I have one of the back paddles be a toggle

As far as games go if you stick to verified and playable you’ll have no problem. The playable games sometimes have small issues such as small text (the deck has a built in magnifier) a 16:9 resolution leading to small black bars at the top of the 16:10 screen

You can boot into desktop mode and have a full on desktop environment, not some half desktop but like a full on computer. It does use a Linux system so I can’t really say much about that as I don’t use Linux on my computer. But I did get Emudeck going which has a ton of emulators ready to go and makes it easy to use in game mode (the mode where you’re not in desktop)

I'm not sure what sort of information do you expect... it's fun? It's just a portable PC, not much more to it, I love mine.

If you are planning to buy steam DOCK, don't. It has been a complete shitshow.

Updates fails dozen times before finishing without crashing. Sometimes you need to disconnect power, so it switches to deck power for the update process even start and same trick works, if the dock refuses to see the external displays. Connect power back after it spasms in the right direction.

30 euro garbage from local supermarket works better.

So I’m super happy with my OLED, I switched my Switch for in and have zero regrets. I play mainly on my PC and use the Deck for couch gaming mainly for games that don’t use mouse/keyboard, like older games, emulation, rpgs, twin sticks shooters, etc. I play most of the time in handheld mode.

But there are a few things I would wish they were better, some are personal preferences so take them as they are:

• I wish the screen was larger. Im in my mid forties and on games with tiny characters (e.g. Hades) thi is particularly noticeable.
• The back buttons suck big time, like really, you then go back to your controller of choice with back paddles and it’s even more noticeable how bad they are. In general the controls could use some better ergonomics.
• The whole dock situation is very broken in my opinion, especially if you compare it to something as seamless as the Switch. For several reasons: when docking, sometimes the image doesn’t fill the TV screen because the Deck is 16:10 and the TV is 16:9 and they have different resolution. There is a setting to mitigate that, sometimes it works, sometimes it’s not. And when it’s not you either have to deal with it or restart the game. HDMI CEC is a whole world of its own, you may have a dock that supports it or not and if not is a pain to deal with. Have a third party controller for when it is docked? Well, you’ll have to fiddle in the settings every time you dock or undock for it to work properly.
• The cloud save thing is finicky too. You will be surprised at how many games in your library don’t support it, well, at least in my library, probably because I play lots of older games. But even in the games that support it, it lacks a lot. See. The point of cloud saving would be to be able to seamlessly switch between your Deck and PC and vice versa and continue playing there, right? Well, not quite. In order for Steam Cloud to work you need to EXIT the game first (and pray that the game you are playing allow for saving freely anytime), then wait a few seconds for it to sync (sometimes up to half a minute). It might sound picky but you are playing on the Deck, you want to just press the standby button, leave it resting on the dock and go play to your PC. Well not so fast.
• There are other minor gripes like when sometimes it takes an eternity to wake from standby or when the mouse doesn’t work on desktop mode for some reason and you have to keep the Steam hey pressed for it to work.
• Getting your GOG, Epic or Amazon games to work is not always as straightforward as Heroic Launcher makes it seem and sometimes you’ll need to troubleshoot stuff.

Is still a great machine that allows your entire PC library on the go and works great on all games I throw at it but my point is that it is not as seamless as some people want to make it look. It is not a console and it shows. I don’t have a problem with that but it is worth noticing it.