It comes with a free Portal-inspired 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.

Look into framegen. It actually works quite well and can make the difference between 40 fps not stable to 60 fps stable. It will introduce some artifacts, but on this screen size they are quite negligible.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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 :(

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)

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.

It's incredible as an emulation machine. And emudeck made it incredibly easy to set up.

The multi user experience is really bad if you share any games