Welp, new Rift S owner here. I've seen it said here that the S is intended to be the headset that pulls a lot of new users into VR, and I guess it worked. Not technically my first VR experience with Elite, but only because I got to try it for like five minutes at a demo years ago. You folks weren't kidding about it being a totally different experience. Amazing fun!
Big shout out to DrKaii for EDProfiler! My first experience was almost unusably jerky and distorted, in hindsight because it was still basically using my 2D quality settings. Would have taken me forever and a day to figure out a combination of settings that gives me good performance, but applying the VR Medium profile did the trick in one go. I'm still tweaking, but so much easier having a good starting point.
Other thoughts ... not having much used the first-gen sets I'm not sure what SDE is supposed to look like. I can definitely see the pixels in the Rift S, but not distractingly so once I'm engrossed in the game. I suppose the audio is worse than dedicated headphones can be, but it's not bad and I definitely appreciate being able to hear if the cat's knocking something over. I've got several hundred hours playing with KB+M, and it only took a few minutes to get the hang of finding them by feel. Works fine, and honestly I don't know how I'd manage if I had fewer buttons than the keyboard provides. Might swap out the mouse for a stick one of these days though. But on that note, I think the biggest surprise was that in VR, I'm substantially more competent in FA-off flight! It feels like the headset experience is actually engaging my sense of equilibrium, because suddenly I have a sense of my motion in space that I've never had playing in 2D.