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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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)

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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