Steps for cheap gaming:

1. Add Humble Bundle and Fanatical to your browser’s bookmarks. Check them every week for new bundles.
2. Register at Epic games. No matter how much people hate’em, you’ll be getting one to two free games per week. Some of them AAA titles, or even better. Yeah, no kidding: the whole Batman Arkham trilogy, the whole Bioshock collection, etc.
3. Since Epic-isn’t-Steam, those games won’t be “launchable” through Steam’s UI on your Deck by default. Switch to Desktop Mode, install Heroic Games Launcher or Lutris from the available software, and follow the instructions to add Epic games to your Deck.
4. Whenever you see a game you like ANYWHERE, make sure to add it to your Steam Wishlist. THEN…
5. …pay a visit to IsThereAnyDeal and login with your Steam account. You’ll also have to set your Steam profile to “public”, IIRC, for IsThereAnyDeal to access it. Then, go to your IsThereAnyDeal account’s settings (which will have been created when you log-in with your Steam one), add your mail, and enable email notifications.

Result: Free games each week and daily updates in your Inbox for whenever games you want have dropped in price.

Enjoy!

It worked for me, but I’d already finished it on my PC with mouse and keyboard, which I always prefer for “such games”. I don’t remember having to do anything special to run it on the Deck - and, actually, it was the very first game I installed on it, since it’s one of my favorites, and I wanted to check out how it would compare to “the desktop experience”.

Worst case scenario you might have to choose a different version of Proton to run it. That might seem complicated the first time you try it, but after your first attempt (and less than 10 minutes of your time), you’ll know “how to do it” for all other games in less than 1 minute.

Awesome! Thanks, that’s precisely the kind of information I was asking for, since I’ve run into conflicted posts about Windows compatibility with the Deck’s hardware.

However, even if using virtualization on the Deck, and despite it not being a powerhouse, I don’t expect it to offer a much worse experience than what I’d been using up to months ago: a ten-year-old Intel Q6600 with a GTX 970. AFAIK, the Deck is relatively similar as far as performance goes.