One of the beautiful things about Linux is it’s versatility. Many people want to use their hardware for things other than gaming. For instance, I saw a Steam Deck at Disneyland being used to operate “autonomous” robots in Star Wars Land.

For me, I have been doing the vast majority of my gaming on my Steam Deck ever since I got it, however, recently, I was wanting to do some programming work while I was out and about, and was running into a lot of road blocks trying to do it on my Steam Deck. They can be overcome, but I found myself thinking about how much easier it would be to do my work on it, if it had a different distribution installed.

The Steam Deck is a consumer appliance, and as such has reasonable safeguards in place to protect users from themselves. Some users want to go beyond what’s available out of the box, and I imagine that freedom is what motivates most people to put other operating systems on their device.