I recently sold part of my inventory to buy my very own deck (yes, I know what happens on the 16th but I’m not in NA and I’m quite content with what I’m already getting for the discounted price) and I wanted to be ready for the day it eventually arrives, so my question is: what tips would you give to a total newbie like me? Any must have apps, settings? Any kind of advice is welcome really.
Don’t do any modifications to ANYTHING until you NEED to. Use the Deck vanilla for as long as possible.
Education. Learn how proton works. Learn your way around the Linux file system. Configure your Dolphin file manager to a “friendly to Deck” configuration.
Don’t try to jump in too deep. Play verified games … avoid any game from a third party locker like EA, Rockstar, Ubisoft until you are comfortable with how everything works.
Avoid emulation until you’re comfortable with where things are and how they work.
How and where could I educate myself in advance about proton, Linux etc? I’m very interested about using the deck as an emulation platform but I will take your advice and wait a bit
This is who I cater to…
Recommended curriculum for the new user
Roughly in order … all of these videos are listed above.
Honestly from my experience the only thing about proton you need to know is how to switch versions, add launch arguments and how to find tweaks you need to apply for your game to work properly (you can find that out on protondb)
Sometimes you might need to install a custom version of proton called ProtonGE, which has some additional tweaks that some games need to work, so you could learn how to do that too but most games usually don’t need it, so you can figure that out once you encounter such game.
You don’t need to know much about Linux when using the steam deck. There may be some times that you might need to open up a terminal to set something up like cryo utilities and steam deck plugins but you can just follow a guide, you don’t need to understand what the commands do.