If you find yourself taking and sharing a lot of screenshots outside of Steam. Install the Shotty plugin for Decky Loader to have then organized and accessible without needing to dig into Proton prefixes.

And then, access your ~/Pictures/Screenshots folder over SFTP from your phone or some other PC for efficient shitposting!

P.S. I use Solid Explorer on Android for SFTP.

P P.S. Set up SSH as soon as you can. It’s saved me a lot of effort when I boot-looped my Deck by creating a bunch of circular symlinks 🙃

Documentation is a bit sparse at first

To get to linux mode you have to go to the power/shutdown menu

To open the keyboard in linux mode push x

You can use the two little trackpads to type on the keyboard and also to move the mouse around

Archive.org is amazing for archived retro games

I find KDE connect to be both useful and interesting to use. It’s not really recommendable in and of itself but it makes connecting between your various devices very effective, like file transfer, clipboard sharing, remote control etc.

With regards to casual gaming, I personally don’t have anything to recommend because that’s exactly the kind of game I try to avoid. I like involved games, interesting, with a story, a purpose, requiring thinking and such. But what I can say is that the steam deck is so effective with its sleep functionality that you can very casually play any involved game no matter how much time you have.

It is so easy to be back in the game: I’ve played the witcher 3 a lot (highly recommend it if you have not played it) and it is a very involved game, but I’ve been in and out for even just a few minutes thanks to sleep. It takes one second to be back in the game fighting some enemies and takes a second to pause the game and put the console back to sleep in my backpack. You don’t have to restrict yourself to casual games to benefit from casually playing, with the steam deck.

I have enjoyed cyberpunk2077, elden ring, harry potter, and its totally worth installing retrodeck as you can put on a lot of low space using things. oh and baldurs gate 3 and starfield.

A thing to do: Look up how to install Nested Desktop into Gaming Mode (a quick YouTube video will show you how to set it up in about two minutes). In short, it allows you to access most of the functionality of Desktop Mode when you need those things, without actually having to officially switch over (think of it as Gaming Mode’s Desktop Mode Emulator).

Saves you bunches of time in the switching back and forth, as it’s almost instantaneous. I use it all the time, as stuff like web browsers also work better on the Desktop side.

As for casual games you can play for short bursts and put to sleep whenever… you already mentioned Balatro, that’s a great one. I love roguelikes and deck builders for this purpose in general. Recently, I’ve been playing a ton of Cobalt Core, I’d highly recommend as a great pick up and play and quick stop.

I also only got my first deck last month a d went through a similar though.

I’d suggest:

• Play with it a bit stock. It’s a great experience and you really don’t NEED more.
• If you have any interest in playing older consoles, Emudeck is an amazing experience and worth it for the ‘oh wow’ factor
• Add Plex / streaming though flathub/discover and add to steam for travel streaming
• Consider decky for a few QOL menu additions
• For pick up and put down games review threads on indies for games you’ll love. Balatro, Hades, Dave the diver, dredge, undertale, into the breech, FTL, the list is quite long and there are utter gems, but it will be dictated by what you enjoy

Honestly the one thing I’d definitely do is set up Syncthing using a guide like this. It’s really convenient for games without cloud saves, and I also use it to sync my music library.

The main thing IMO is to get some hands on time with it. Figure what you want, what you like, and most importantly what you would like to see improved… and go from there. See if you prefer to use it as a console, or if you want more of a gaming computer and use regularly the desktop. Maybe you’ll want a dock and how you want it will depend on your needs. You get my point :D

Anyway for the laptop see if you like https://nobaraproject.org/download-nobara/ specifically the Nvidia one so it has the drivers pre installed. I use it “everywhere”

I have to second what xavier666 said. Use it as-is, at least for some time.

The only thing I would recommend is, that if you plan to play a lot of non-Steam games, it might be worth to enable SFTP access, so you can copy games from your PC over WLAN: https://handheld.quest/posts/how-to-ssh-steam-deck/
(just beware to not have it enabled while in a public WLAN - or at least disable password-based login)

Oh, and in case you want to play DOS games, I’ve written a short guide on how to configure DosBOX staging in order to get MIDI music working: https://www.grois.info/posts/2023-02/2023-02-02-dosbox-with-midi-on-the-steam-deck.xhtml

First off, welcome! You’ll love the steam deck. I don’t have any specific hidden gems but if you’re planning on using this a lot on public transit, look for smaller games to play like Dredge. Anything too intensive will drain your battery a ton faster than a smaller game. Plus it will heat up and fans will be going bbrrrrrrr. May be worth getting a portable power bank if you can’t charge on transit. Also the largest SD card you can get to add to that puppy. Enjoy!

My boring advice is to spend a few weeks using it as it is out of the box: just play your favorite games on it.
After a while you might get a sense of what you would like to change (if anything) and then you can research how to go about it.

For casual games on the Deck some my most played are The Binding of Isaac (most hours by far), Brotato, Deep Rock Survivor, Slay the Spire, Balatro, Dead Cells, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Shotgun King. But there are so many good choices, it really depends on your taste.

Only useful for desktop mode, but KDE Connect is great for syncing clipboards, sharing files, and even remote mouse and keyboard input between a smartphone and the desktop environment.

It’s a game changer compared to using the touchscreen keyboard. Especially with a dock using it as an occasional media PC.

Set up parsec and play windows games Set up windroid and play android games

Also steam deck sleep feature is so fucking good you can stop anywhere

• Use the device as is. It doesn’t need a lot of tinkering. But in case you see your fav game is tagged as “unsupported”, check out the game on protondb.com. Chances are it’s probably well supported.
• If you intend to travel a lot with the device, you can buy an Apple AirTag or Tile
• The device is excellent for indie games, 2d/platformers
• If you want to connect it to your living room TV or use it as a gaming console, you can buy a dock and a pair of controllers. Great for local play.

If you don’t have a separate device to steam link with your deck, I’d recommend getting a Bluetooth keyboard. Even if you do, the keyboard would be handy if you’re out. It really helps with navigating the desktop mode when you need to mess with that side of it.