Wait a few days for CES and see what other vendors will ship with SteamOS. Asus and Lenovo usually allow to limit battery charging. Steam Deck doesn't.
on GNOME I have a GUI utility that lets you set this and enable/disable with a toggle.
The charging controller must support that feature. Notebooks by Asus, Lenovo and maybe others do, perhaps even the Ally and Legion handhelds, but if the battery controller doesn't support that, the toggle will do nothing.
that’s fine and all but the problem with the debian based SteamOS were the horribly outdated GPU drivers.
SteamOS doesn't use plain upstream GPU drivers. Back when SteamOS 3 was announced, Valve employees said in interviews that switching to an Arch base would allow them to more frequently update the OS, yes, but now with SteamOS 3 being out since quite some time it became clear that this is simply not the case. Big Arch package syncs are a rare occurrence, kernel and Mesa are maintained in their own downstream branches.
tbf back then they picked possibly the worst base for a gaming distro, a problem that has been remedied with the new SteamOS
The actual runtime the games run on is still based on Debian, though.
there is also Heroic, which is similiar to lutris but in my opinion a bit nicer to configure :)
Heroic defaults to an ancient version of Wine-GE. They are currently in the process to migrate to a new tech called umu-launcher which allows them to use Valve's Proton and Proton-GE directly. It's basically done, so should appear in Heroic 2.16 but if one tries Heroic today, the compatibility might be worse than Lutris or Bottles.
I realize I’m probably in the minority here, but do they have an option at the original 1280x800?
Wouldn't it then make more sense to sell you LCD Deck and buy an OLED one? Whether you buy an extra screen or the added cost of a new OLED one, the price difference should be in the same ballpark. Not to mention the risk of damage and the need for a modified BIOS. New warranty on the OLED model would be an added bonus.
Maybe my memory is wrong or it was different in an older SteamOS version. I remember Valve changed something about mounting SD cards a couple of months ago.
I don't think Steam lets you pick the location for Proton's virtual environments which is where Steam installs non-Steam games. AFAIK they are always in the home directory and you can only pick a random location when it's a portable game without setup.exe.
then chang the path of the exe and the working folder to those of the installed game
I feel the need to underline this part because removing the setup.exe entry and the adding the installed exe doesn't work. The entire virtual drive gets deleted when removing setup.exe. This makes the procedure a bit more complicated than it should be but it's needed when it has to go through Steam because of Steam Deck Game Mode.
It gets ugly really fast.
It's super easy, barely an inconvenience. Just use Distrobox: https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/Distrobox/
Games? Nigh impossible.
Decades ago DOS games had custom intro animations but that's not really relevant for current games.