3.0 Exclusions
The Limited Warranty does not apply if the Hardware:
has been modified or repaired by anyone except a Valve-designated service center and the cause of the issue for which you seek service is the modification or repair, or damage caused by either;

Quote from Valve Hardware Warranty.

In other words, simply changing SSD doesn't void warranty, but damaging the Steam Deck in the process of doing so does.

I would highly recommend the Deathlands series by GraphicAudio.

Exactly my reasoning for holding off too.

It's also worth taking a look at Fallout 4 VR for anyone that's into VR. Mods stealthily makes it into the best and most immersive experience yet, in my heavily biased opinion.

OVPN still seems to support port forwarding, though it's worth pointing out they were recently acquired by Pango.

I highly recommend using nitter instances to look at content from Twitter. And with the excellent LibRedirect extension, the process becomes seamless and you can bounce between instances as you please.

Stay away from DInput (DirectInput) only controllers as much as possible if you also have the intention to use it on Windows. Unfortunately, many of those cheaper Chinese telescopic or clip-on phone/tablet controllers only support DInput and not XInput, which will make it a right pain to get to work in most situations. It's not something that's clearly stated anywhere usually either, so keep that in mind.

However, if you do happen to find a Chinese controller, and there are some okay ones out there, that unfortunately only has DInput; there exists a fantastic tool to emulate XInput called XOutput that I would highly recommend!

Never played the first but would buy it in a heartbeat to play on the Steam Deck.

This is the way! Though I personally prefer Violentmonkey.

Well said.

Wish the time played per operating system returned, that was highly useful to me in order to track my playtime on Steam Deck.

The only real issue I've stumbled upon were random crashes, which crashes the whole Steam Deck oddly enough. Since changing to Proton Experimental I have had such crashes maybe once or twice in ~20 hours, so I would say that mitigated it.

800x500 is a great resolution to play at, I find. Every text is perfectly readable and HUD is at a great size, in fact, it feels like it's made for Steam Deck. Also changing to 32-bit color mode is a good idea.

The most important part really is the controller layout. There are some great community ones out there, though I found myself customizing it a lot to fit my personal taste.

To be frank, I haven't played further than playing through Liberty Island on GOTY, and a bit further. Personally I opted for Revision instead, with vanilla map type, vanilla soundtrack, all HDTP models to false, New Vision disabled, and normal Revision gameplay style (which brings a lot of QoL stuff, bugfixes, but nothing I've found to be really intrusive).

Revision on Steam Deck, with the changes I mentioned, is very stable and faithful enough experience in my mind. The only problem I found was that all data vault images are still for the Revision maps, so they won't line up and will quickly become confusing. I ended up manually swapping the images, which was a painstaking endeavor I wouldn't wish on anyone, but it worked out in the end. Might end up uploading it somewhere at some point, but I should instead really just report it to the team and hope it gets fixed. My main reasoning for choosing Revision was honestly the achievements, it's a fun bonus and a ton of them still apply to vanilla maps. That, and the fact that it just feels like integrates seamlessly into Steam, being a mod with its own store page. And once I'm done with this, I'm very tempted to just jump back in and play through actual Revision with Lay D Denton.

Though if I started out now, I would probably seriously consider taking a look at Transcended or Deus Ex Randomizer with Zero Rando mode (just heard of the latter first here, so I'd have to look into it more before choosing). I'm not sure how smooth the process of getting that into GOTY on Steam Deck is, and I'd miss out on those achievements from Revision of course, but it could be well worth it still.

That all said, just playing GOTY straight out of the box works, with the few things in mind which I wrote about above. There's a myriad of bugs and stuff in GOTY that are just there, of course, but it's not related to Steam Deck and still play very well.