Buy less games and play more games from your backlog lol.

When you are playing a game if it is at all demanding you first want to go into settings and try to keep stuff on the low end. In general you can keep texture quality high/max and can keep antialising at the higher setting but always turn down any shadow quality and volumetric fog effect down very low. Other settings usually medium or low. Next for most games if you are not playing plugged in you are problably gonna want to limit your fps. Don’t expect to play every game at 60fps. Depending on the title and how hard it is to run limit your fps in settings to 30-50fps.

Download and play aperture science desk job and play it.

Buy/download/play game Buy/download/play game And repeat

The controller settings are amazing. You can download community settings for any game, and I would strongly suggest getting games you can’t on Xbox.

Wired mouse even some dirt cheap like 10 dollars is the best accessory you can buy. This is very useful to play games that were designed with mouse in mind like basically all strategy games. For games try Ori Will of Wisp first(turn on hdr in settings if it is off).

Mainly just to check www.protondb.com for individual games and how they run. Steam has a easy refund policy- i think it’s two weeks after purchase or two hours of gameplay- if something won’t run you can easily get a refund.

Don’t pretend to run all games on high settings at high frame rates.

-Look up a video, how the game actually runs before you decide to buy. I mean, some people tend to over-estimate Steam Deck capabilities, when they write about them, but video just shows the real capabilities for each game.

-ProtonDB is your best buddy. You can find there settings, that will probably suit Deck the best. Expecially nice for begineers, who don’t have the “know-how” with performance and quality impact of each setting.

-Don’t be afraid of desktop mode. If you intend to use Deck just as a gaming device, you’ll be satisfied. But it can do more. A lot more. Maybe you could even grasp some Linux basic skills just by playing with your Deck’s desktop mode. I personally do computational chemistry and oh boah, how Deck could be useful even for productivity tasks.

-My list of Deck recommended games (look them up in Autumn sale): Red Dead Redemption 2 (runs exceptionally well and looks gorgeous on Deck), Cyberpunk 2077 (used to run poorly, but with 2.00 update and SteamOS 3.5, it runs and looks great), Witcher 3, Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, Mafia II, L. A. Noire, Tropico 6, GTA V…

You already made the wiser choice and went for the steamdeck and not the Nintendo switch. If I could turn back time I’d get the steam deck as well. Hope you have fun with it 🥳

for high powered games when you adjust down the fps adjust the hz as well.

I was an absolute beginner as well, as you face issues then look for solutions, it’s great out of the box and then you will know what you need!

ex. there are very cool options for button mapping, once you find a game you don’t like the controls for, look into that.

if you get annoyed with the back buttons looks for an accessory that helps

if you want to put it on your tv look for a dock.