Tips for the first timer, BE PATIENT WITH THE FIRST STARTUP AND PATCH, it'll look non responsive/stuck in updating, but it is working, it might not progress for 5 or 10 minutes, believe me, it's working. The second one I bought (for a family member) had me nervous (was refurbished) at how long I had to wait at some %'s of patching, but it went through and both work like a charm.

It is very very easy to emulate games, the guides on YouTube work perfectly and explain everything in multiple levels of detail. However it is hard to locate game files placed by steam, especially if you have a lot of games.

Don't shy away from games that aren't typically controller friendly, the community control layouts bring many creative and natural feeling solutions to games that you wouldn't expect to be able to play, on top of that you can fine tune any given layout to make it truly work for your own needs.

The in store "deck compatability" guide is pretty useless, green/verified works 99.9% of the time (unless a recent patch has broken something, and it's usually corrected very quickly) yellow/playable works 99.9% of the time but usually with "text inputs that require the keyboard overlay", unverified/untested seems to work about 75% of the time, the only one that Ive put much weight in is "not supported", usually there's some overlay window or codex that just won't work properly, but even then sometimes the games work, don't rely on the steam window, check out the proton compatability website protondb . Com, it's a much more extensive and thorough list, and will tell you how to get games working that valve claims the deck cannot handle.

Play aperture desk job at least once, it's a great fun time, and will teach you a couple things about the deck you might not have expected (conductive joysticks that enable gyro controls),

Take a screen shot (steam button+r1) of the shortcut tips screen , so you can easily reference it whenever you're trying to remember a chord command (like steam button+r1 for screenshot, or how to bring the overlay keyboard up).

If you have slow Internet and you want to download a ton of games, do it in "desktop" mode, and you can set the screen to turn off after a period of time (in case you're worried about burn in, which I was at first but I'm much less concerned about now).