If you don’t want to play new, graphically demanding AAA games and/or you’re okay settling for lower graphics settings/resolution then sure.

I have to say, 800p resolution looks significantly better than 720p on a TV. Yes, you will have black bars on the sides. But at a minimum, any game that runs well on the SD’s internal display can be played at 800p on a TV and still be a decent experience. I am playing ‘High On Life’ this way (because 1080p is impossible), and it’s honestly not a bad experience at all.

No, mine is perfectly fine.

Maybe it was different in the past but you very rarely need to change Proton versions for anything. It’s super easy to do if you ever need to, though.

FSR is also super useful, and not very intuitive. If games have built-in FSR 2.0 then try that first, otherwise if you set the game to a lower resolution than 1280x800 and disable fullscreen mode, you can enable FSR in the Steam Deck performance settings. I didn’t know about the fullscreen thing forever, so I thought it just didn’t work in a bunch of games.

I tried it last night with ‘7 Days to Die’, which is a very poorly optimized game that struggles to get a stable fps on any system. I found that lowering the resolution and enabling FSR looks almost as good as running in 1280x800, and allowed me to use Ultra graphics settings.

Also, weirdly, ‘High On Life’ has FSR 2.0 built in to the game, but when I enable it it looks like garbage. The deck’s FSR 1.0 somehow looks miles better for that game.

Has ANYONE been able to finish checkout?

If I’m not mistaken I think Valve limits sales by Steam account, which makes it a lot harder to scalpers to grab multiple units. Unlike, say, Walmart, which will allow the same person to buy 50 PS5s and resell them on the Walmart website.