I dual boot into windows with my steam deck. I sail the high seas until a game becomes worthy and then I buy it. Buying a game at launch is way to hit and miss and way to expensive. Learned my last lesson with forspoken. Never again.

The exception to this rule is multiplayer games, but typically for multiplayer there’s enough evidence if it’s gonna be good or not due to betas and the like.

Anyway the SD dual booted into windows to be able to do whatever you deem necessary at your budget, that’s the way to go Imho. Don’t let the boyscouts on this thread tell you otherwise. Developers have lost the trust of the people for a reason, loot boxes, micro transactions, releasing unfinished games, dlcs, forced console choices for the same software, the inability to share physical copies of anything anymore, the loss of rentals ect. You get my hard earned money when you show me you worked hard enough to earn it and not a goddamn second before. And I’ll be damned if I’m paying for the same game I paid for on a ps5 again just to play it on another device. Same goes for switch or Xbox.

How the sheeple have let the world get this far I dunno.

Bg3 is a great example of a company earning my money, and the game is now sitting pretty in my library on Steam AFTER I put 40+ hours into it already.

I am remorseless and unashamed.

First setup the games she used to play on an emulator. Second since you didn’t give a genre you gotta give her options

Puzzle games - Portal 1 and 2. Tetris. Puzzle quest. And maybe a few more. Platformers - cult of the lamb. Ori and the blind forest. Celeste. RPG- ni no kuni 2. Ff7 remake. The Witcher 3. Bastion. Card games - slay the spire, poker, solitaire Rogue like - hades, dead cells. Action adventure - Uncharted, God of war, Horizon . FPS - Doom, Titanfall, call of duty. Half life Strategy - civilization, age of empires… I’m not familiar enough with this genre on deck. Visual novels - doki doki lit club Souls like - whatever is in the space, sekiro Farming sim - stardew valley and Dave the diver Racing - NFS, forza Managment - the sims, f1 manager, sim city.

Basically get a good bit of each genre and encourage her to try the games out.

And setup emulation station to be plug and play, get something like tiny best set go or whatever and give her some easy options. Scraped to look nice.

2tb ssd card paired with 1tb sd card. Jsaux backplate, attachable battery pack, and anti glare screen protector.

Partitioned windows onto the internal drive. 1tb for windows and 1 for Steam Os. I keep my roms on the micro sd card.

Has worked out well.

I also got a dock and wireless keyboard and mouse to pair with it.

Only thing I’ve been dragging my heels on is another charger for a different room in my house.

Lastly I did get an hdmi switch to switch between my SD and main PC when wanted for one of my two monitors.

I decided against modding my front case, or my screen and joysticks. Currently my sticks aren’t drifting so no need, and not worth the extra driver hassle. Screen mods are equally annoying with drivers and bios flashing, and if I’m not changing those then I don’t need the cosmetic upgrade of a front case.

Wasn’t worth it for my use case.

Ram mods look interesting but performance gain vs cost vs effort is rough to justify