1 - Check the headphone jack

2 - Buy a decent screen protector

3 - Enjoy it

Optional > Use a cheap dock and a bluetooth controller (don't wast money on the original) x a great console experience from your tv. Also great for watch movies and youtube with adblock.

I find KDE connect to be both useful and interesting to use. It's not really recommendable in and of itself but it makes connecting between your various devices very effective, like file transfer, clipboard sharing, remote control etc.

With regards to casual gaming, I personally don't have anything to recommend because that's exactly the kind of game I try to avoid. I like involved games, interesting, with a story, a purpose, requiring thinking and such. But what I can say is that the steam deck is so effective with its sleep functionality that you can very casually play any involved game no matter how much time you have.

It is so easy to be back in the game: I've played the witcher 3 a lot (highly recommend it if you have not played it) and it is a very involved game, but I've been in and out for even just a few minutes thanks to sleep. It takes one second to be back in the game fighting some enemies and takes a second to pause the game and put the console back to sleep in my backpack. You don't have to restrict yourself to casual games to benefit from casually playing, with the steam deck.

My boring advice is to spend a few weeks using it as it is out of the box: just play your favorite games on it.
After a while you might get a sense of what you would like to change (if anything) and then you can research how to go about it.

For casual games on the Deck some my most played are The Binding of Isaac (most hours by far), Brotato, Deep Rock Survivor, Slay the Spire, Balatro, Dead Cells, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Shotgun King. But there are so many good choices, it really depends on your taste.

I also only got my first deck last month a d went through a similar though.

I'd suggest:

• Play with it a bit stock. It's a great experience and you really don't NEED more.
• If you have any interest in playing older consoles, Emudeck is an amazing experience and worth it for the 'oh wow' factor
• Add Plex / streaming though flathub/discover and add to steam for travel streaming
• Consider decky for a few QOL menu additions
• For pick up and put down games review threads on indies for games you'll love. Balatro, Hades, Dave the diver, dredge, undertale, into the breech, FTL, the list is quite long and there are utter gems, but it will be dictated by what you enjoy

Only useful for desktop mode, but KDE Connect is great for syncing clipboards, sharing files, and even remote mouse and keyboard input between a smartphone and the desktop environment.

It's a game changer compared to using the touchscreen keyboard. Especially with a dock using it as an occasional media PC.

The main thing IMO is to get some hands on time with it. Figure what you want, what you like, and most importantly what you would like to see improved… and go from there. See if you prefer to use it as a console, or if you want more of a gaming computer and use regularly the desktop. Maybe you’ll want a dock and how you want it will depend on your needs. You get my point :D

Anyway for the laptop see if you like https://nobaraproject.org/download-nobara/ specifically the Nvidia one so it has the drivers pre installed. I use it “everywhere”

A thing to do: Look up how to install Nested Desktop into Gaming Mode (a quick YouTube video will show you how to set it up in about two minutes). In short, it allows you to access most of the functionality of Desktop Mode when you need those things, without actually having to officially switch over (think of it as Gaming Mode's Desktop Mode Emulator).

Saves you bunches of time in the switching back and forth, as it's almost instantaneous. I use it all the time, as stuff like web browsers also work better on the Desktop side.

As for casual games you can play for short bursts and put to sleep whenever... you already mentioned Balatro, that's a great one. I love roguelikes and deck builders for this purpose in general. Recently, I've been playing a ton of Cobalt Core, I'd highly recommend as a great pick up and play and quick stop.

Setup Nixpkgs. Learn Home-Manager. If anything doesn't exist on Flathub, install it through Nixpkgs instead of disabling immutability and resorting to pacman only to have it wiped after an update. And for temporary tinkering, use nix-shell.

The determinate.systems Nix installer directly supports the Steam Deck.

• Use the device as is. It doesn't need a lot of tinkering. But in case you see your fav game is tagged as "unsupported", check out the game on protondb.com. Chances are it's probably well supported.
• If you intend to travel a lot with the device, you can buy an Apple AirTag or Tile
• The device is excellent for indie games, 2d/platformers
• If you want to connect it to your living room TV or use it as a gaming console, you can buy a dock and a pair of controllers. Great for local play.

Documentation is a bit sparse at first

To get to linux mode you have to go to the power/shutdown menu

To open the keyboard in linux mode push x

You can use the two little trackpads to type on the keyboard and also to move the mouse around

Archive.org is amazing for archived retro games

Set up parsec and play windows games Set up windroid and play android games

Also steam deck sleep feature is so fucking good you can stop anywhere

I'd say check out these CryoByte videos:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfaWKmIGzvA
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVlpVtDdgds
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B8ZGCO2ADg

If you find yourself taking and sharing a lot of screenshots outside of Steam. Install the Shotty plugin for Decky Loader to have then organized and accessible without needing to dig into Proton prefixes.

And then, access your ~/Pictures/Screenshots folder over SFTP from your phone or some other PC for efficient shitposting!

P.S. I use Solid Explorer on Android for SFTP.

P P.S. Set up SSH as soon as you can. It's saved me a lot of effort when I boot-looped my Deck by creating a bunch of circular symlinks 🙃

First off, welcome! You’ll love the steam deck. I don’t have any specific hidden gems but if you’re planning on using this a lot on public transit, look for smaller games to play like Dredge. Anything too intensive will drain your battery a ton faster than a smaller game. Plus it will heat up and fans will be going bbrrrrrrr. May be worth getting a portable power bank if you can’t charge on transit. Also the largest SD card you can get to add to that puppy. Enjoy!

If you don't have a separate device to steam link with your deck, I'd recommend getting a Bluetooth keyboard. Even if you do, the keyboard would be handy if you're out. It really helps with navigating the desktop mode when you need to mess with that side of it.

I have enjoyed cyberpunk2077, elden ring, harry potter, and its totally worth installing retrodeck as you can put on a lot of low space using things. oh and baldurs gate 3 and starfield.

I have to second what xavier666 said. Use it as-is, at least for some time.

The only thing I would recommend is, that if you plan to play a lot of non-Steam games, it might be worth to enable SFTP access, so you can copy games from your PC over WLAN: https://handheld.quest/posts/how-to-ssh-steam-deck/
(just beware to not have it enabled while in a public WLAN - or at least disable password-based login)

Oh, and in case you want to play DOS games, I've written a short guide on how to configure DosBOX staging in order to get MIDI music working: https://www.grois.info/posts/2023-02/2023-02-02-dosbox-with-midi-on-the-steam-deck.xhtml

Honestly the one thing I'd definitely do is set up Syncthing using a guide like this. It's really convenient for games without cloud saves, and I also use it to sync my music library.

If you plan to use yours as a laptop replacement, get Bazzite (maybe CachyOS, but I don't have experience with their handheld version). SteamOS is great, but the major drawback for daily computing is that every update will wipe out your modifications to the core system (not your home directory). Bazzite and some others will give you a persistent system with each update.

For gaming, Hades works flawlessly. It's easy to pick up and put down, doesn't consume a lot of battery, and the story/gameplay are phenomenal.

Make sure to also check out RetroDeck/EmuDeck and Decky Loader to extend what your Deck can do

That is a lot of contradictory sets of requirements. If it is important to have on the deck then it is going to be trivially searchable online. Something that is niche that others are not really doing is going to be very subjectively interesting or useful. That makes it impossible to recommend anything without violating one of those requirements.

Instead here is some advice for finding project ideas: Look at your own interests/hobbies/things you need to do and start taking note of problems you encounter, grievances or annoyances you have or just things you think could be made/done easier. Out of those you can look at ones that you think a steam deck could help solve and from that you can start to investigate ways to use the steam deck to solve those problems. That is essentially how you find niche and interesting/useful things that are specific to you to work on. It can take time, but the more you think about it and write things down the easier it becomes to find projects to do.

Things that I can just easily stop.

Technically any non-online game will work since you can just put the steam deck to sleep with the tap of the power button when ever you want and resume later on. It takes a couple of seconds to go to sleep and so the only times it is annoying is when you are directly in the middle of some action - which is generally easy to avoid in most games if you know you are coming up to your stop.

Personally I have been playing monster hunter world like this which works quite well - especially since there is quite a bit of less action packed stuff you can do between the main story line.

What are some niche things can could do/install/play on the steam deck that most people wouldn't really do or think about doing?

I will say that the support for some of these "less used" games is very difficult to get running for someone who hasn't used Linux before and controls will be tough depending on the game.
Getting OSRS with runelite was difficult but nice once i got it working. You need to get Wine to run the Jagex launcher then install Runelite separately. Don't ask me how as I hardly remember how I did it myself lol

Also I haven't tried this but getting Flash games would be dope. I don't think I've seen anyone try it yet, but I'm sure someone has.

Also anybody know any casual games can play randomly on public transit and don't have to sit down and play.

Celeste, Doom 1993, webfishing single player.
However the 'sleep' feature means most games work well portably, you don't really need a special game (but still get Celeste it's awesome!) just playing the games you own already will be MORE than enough.

Also anybody know any casual games I can play randomly on public transit and don’t have to sit down and play. Things that I can just easily stop. (Something like balentro kinda way you can just stop whenever)

The beauty of the Steam Deck for me is that any non-online game can now be played in short sessions. I like a lot of jrpgs, but I've gotten stuck in cut scene/boss fight sequences that last 1+ hours without being able to save and stop. The Steam deck is amazing for games like this, because I can literally suspend at any point and then pick right back up where I left off. Being able to play a game without having to worry about running out of time or accidentally getting myself into a part of the game I can't stop has really freed me up to play a lot more games.

I'd it's an OLED model, test the headphone jack. Many decks have constant hiss/static/noise on that port - you can get it RMA'd if you contact support, but that means you'll be sending it away for 10 days or so to get sound board replaced.

Other than that, I recommend installing DECKY which is an ad on that in turn allows installing useful plugging such as incorporating deck compatibility rating into games displayed, better power management, etc