4 Things You Should Do First On Your Steam Deck OLED

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Whether you’re eating the price increase or fishing one out of Facebook Marketplace, the Steam Deck OLED isn’t something you have to tinker with too much when you boot it. If you’re just here to play some games, be sure to check that they work over on ProtonDB. As we’ve discussed before with the Steam Machine and Steam Deck, Valve’s verified rating system is generally considered poor. Outside of that, there are only a few tips to take on board once you’ve gotten around the system.

As the AI data center tech price crisis continues to ruin everyone’s fun, we can’t even really recommend picking up a microSD card or upgrading the lower-end 512GB storage. Prices have shot up massively, putting already expensive recommendations at around the $80 to $100 mark, or nearly $250 or above in some cases. At these prices, and what you probably paid for the Steam Deck OLED, you’d be having to sift through the Steam store’s free-to-play section if you picked one up.

Instead, here are some non-costly things to do when you first get your Steam Deck OLED, or a Steam Deck LCD, as it’s the same system, just with an LCD screen.

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The best tip for a new Steam Deck OLED user is to just leave it as it is until you’ve either gotten quite used to the stock setup or finished a game. After I spent years covering mods and taking the device apart, I wound up buying a refurbished LCD model to bring me back to the original vision. The Steam Deck is an incredible system at its base level, and really, doesn’t need to be tinkered with outside of a few edge cases — even then, that’s just to play even more stuff on it.

There’s no benefit to looking into programs like Decky, which can integrate a lot of community-made features, like CSS Loader to alter the look, or other bits to add functionality. If you dive immediately into modding or tinkering with the Steam Deck, you’ll likely miss the point of it: To play games on it. Ripping it apart or tearing the software to shreds in the first week will taint the overall experience, especially if you wind up updating the Deck’s firmware first, before Decky, and wind up with a massive error parading over your screen.

Finish a game you didn’t think you’d play, pick something from the backlog, just please, use it as intended before you tinker.

Steam has this wicked feature that most of us won’t ever see. I use it all the time to get rather large games from my PC, and then it installs them to the Deck. It should bring up the option automatically if the Deck detects your PC on the network, and when you press install, it’ll kick in the transfer.

This can be massively beneficial if you’re on a data cap, as it’s only a local network transfer, not pulling in the gigabytes of data from Valve’s servers. Of course, on the LCD Steam Deck, this can be slower due to the older Wi-Fi chip, but on the OLED with 6E Wi-Fi, it should be more than fast enough. It’ll still take some time, and can be sped up by connecting the Deck via a USB-C dock with Ethernet (like the official Steam Deck Dock or one of the many, many others available).

Remember, the Steam Deck is just a PC with a controller embedded into it. Valve has done some fantastic work making the system feel as “console-like” as possible, especially with the Big Picture Mode that automatically boots up. However, it’s best to get accustomed to Linux and, in particular, KDE, the desktop environment that Valve has opted for. This will look quite familiar for those coming from Windows, so you shouldn’t be too lost once you match branded names like “Dolphin” with “File Explorer” and so on.

Desktop Mode is the Steam Deck’s not-so-secret weapon, as here you’ll be able to grab different software to run games through or even do some non-gaming stuff. Valve opted to use Arch Linux as a base, but has corralled the distribution so you can’t bungle things up too much. Don’t worry, the horrors you hear of people running something from the terminal and erasing everything are quite difficult to do on SteamOS.

This is also a great way to get used to how the mouse controls work, especially with the on-screen keyboard. Take it for a spin, because you’ll need it for the next part.

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For those of us who have game libraries across multiple stores, like Good Old Games (GOG) or Epic, these can absolutely come with you to the Steam Deck. Despite Tim Sweeney’s seeming hatred of Linux, it’s actually relatively easy to get all those free games you redeemed from the Epic Store into your Steam Deck. These can also be launched from Game Mode, after you add them to your Steam library as a “non-Steam game.”

Various launchers can be installed, with the best being Heroic, Faugus, and Lutris. Each one does sort of the same thing, importing your other game libraries, but each has additional benefits. Lutris, for instance, has its own repository of software that it’ll grab, install, and manage for you. Heroic Launcher is, again, similar in concept, but emphasizes ease of use over an everything tool.

One major use case for the Steam Deck is retro gaming. No, not just those old games sat in your backlog on Steam, but through emulation and the recent decompilation/recompilation push, which brings the games to a native PC environment. Plenty of guides and tutorials exist, with one of the best ways to jump-start your retro playing adventures being to use Emudeck or RetroDeck. For those with a penchant for the old games, the system will comfortably play up to the Wii U, and there are even projects to bring games like “Bloodborne,” trapped on the PlayStation 4, to PC and systems like the Deck.