Optionally, what would you have wanted to know before you bought one?
Thanks!
Edit: Hey, thank you all very very much for your comments and suggestions, I really appreciate. I will most likely save up more and get the 1TB OLED model rather than the LCD model I was initially planning on. A couple of reasons for that, one, I am not good with electronics and I’d probably screw something up putting a new storage drive in. And two this thing will most likely be a permanent replacement for my old gaming laptop, which at this point is more than 10 years old, and seems to be on its last legs (I installed Linux on it, which was a struggle, but that is probably on me rather than Linux or the computer being at fault).
Anyway, I appreciate everyone’s responses and thanks for helping a gal out!
Changing the SSD was easy and a big cost savings. I bought the cheapest model and upgraded to 512GB because at the time it was a huge price spike to go up to 1TB. My understanding now is that 1TB, or even 1.5TB, makes a lot more sense. Maybe even 2TB, though they are still a lot.
This applies to PC gaming in general, but even moreso for the Deck. The question is not “will it run?”- it is incredibly rare to find any game that simply will not run at all. The questiona are: how well does it run, and how much am I willing to sacrifice to get there? If you want, you can download Aperture Desk Job for free and play through the whole thing in one sitting. It’s incredibly easy to install on a stock Deck with just a couple of button presses, all the controls are mapped perfectly, and it’s designed to look and run great on a Deck. Other games will be more complicated.
I recently went to play Baldur’s Gate 3 with a friend. It’s Verified, but the experience just sucks. It installed just fine, and since it knows it’s on Deck it handles the annoying Larian launcher thing fine. But even when I cranked all of the visual settings to their lowest and limited the Deck to 30FPS, it was still playing the game with the fan on max, loudly blasting hit air out. I think the battery life was less than an hour. The 720p screen really does the game poorly, and the controller UI is… Impressive, but still nowhere near as good as M&KB.
Skyrim is another example. Runs pretty well once you’re in there, but there’s an annoying splash screen first. So you need to either go into the launch options to turn it off (but that’s the only way to adjust the visual settings to make sure you do that first), or just leave a track pad as a mouse (including press-to-click) for that game so you can click past the splash screen and go back to controller mode. Or just use the touch screen if you prefer.
Everything is a balance. Battery life, fan noise, heat, resolution, visual post-processing, frame rate. It’s subjective, and you may want to play a game differently when you’re on your couch vs when you’re on a plane, for example.
I’ve heard of NVIDIA’s Moonlight and the community-made AMD version Sunshine as well. But I think Nvidia has stopped their support, and personally I never even got Sunshine to install on my desktop. Steam Remote Play has dramatically improved over the years and is say it’s pretty good now.
Sony has their official PS Remote Play app for Windows and Android that allows those devices to steam from PS4’s and PS5’s. I assume this is what the PS Portal uses too. There is no official app for Linux, but there is a 3rd party one called Chiaki. You can also install this as a non-Steam game and stream. I’m playing Bloodborne on the Deck on my porch right now as I’m taking this.
The solution? Syncthing. Install this app on your Deck as a non-Steam game. Install it on your desktop, your android TV box, your phone, your old laptop, your NAS. Whether it’s backups or synchronization, it’s great. I’ll catch a Pokemon on my Deck in an emulator, save, move to my desktop, open the save using PKHex, make the pokemon Shiny, then go back to the Deck and enjoy my new shiny pokemon.