Nefyedardu

I don't think there is any confusion about that

Not with windows you can’t, which is the OS the overwhelmingly large majority of people want to use.

Most people don't replace SteamOS on their device so I don't think that's true. Plasma is a perfectly suitable replacement for Windows unless you really need access to Adobe products or something.

There’s more that work and work better on Windows than Linux than there are the other way around though.

True but It's a number that is shrinking every day. We are down to about ~100 games at this point that explicitly cannot work? I play a lot of games and I can't remember the last time I tried to play a game and it didn't work because I was on Linux.

Windows plays every PC game in existence

There's a surprising amount of older PC games that don't work on Windows anymore, but work fine on Linux. I remember trying to play New Vegas a few years ago on Windows 10 and needing four separate mods just to get it to play properly, and even after all that it would still crash every 15-20 minutes. I've since played it all the way through on Fedora and SteamOS with zero tinkering and no crashes.

It also allows you to use the device as a pc replacement via displaying the screen on a tv/monitor

you can do this on steamos

I used to just seed Epic exclusives. Now there aren't any Epic exclusives*. Coincidence? I think not.

*Other than Kingdom Hearts grrr

You are talking about hardware deficiencies more than anything, you can get those on PC too if you just run low-powered hardware. I'm more talking about bugs. Maybe it's changed since I used Windows years ago, but I remember having issues from time to time with PC games. Crashing, weird behavior from alt-tabbing, some games just running at low GPU usage for no reason even though framerate is uncapped, and various glitches. There's a reason there has been a growing interest in sandboxing for software with docker, etc. Software is deterministic, if you give it a consistent environment it will do the same exact thing every time.

It's the principle of "do one thing and do it well". There's nothing wrong with running games in a desktop but there are limitless ways of customizing a PC and it's impossible for developers to account for everything. It would be nice if you could just write some code and have it work flawlessly for everyone's setup but that's not how it goes. For the use case of the Steam Deck where you are dealing with a low-TDP gaming device it makes more sense to have something like gamescope which can just cut out all non-gaming processes entirely. Maximize performance and battery life with a nice interface to boot, and the desktop is still there if you need it. At the very least it makes troubleshooting super easy when stuff does go wrong because there's very few external things to factor in.

Why don't tech reviewers every talk about gamescope? Gaming on PCs has always been finicky because PCs have to serve so many use cases at once and games often have to compete for resources. Gamescope completely circumvents all of this overhead by being solely meant for the purpose of gaming. It's the closest you can get to a "PC Console". Third parties can never make something like gamescope for Windows, Microsoft themselves would have to ship it and maintain it.

I just don't get the vendetta GNOME has against background processes. GNOME devs just don't use email clients, cloud sync applications, chat clients...? GNOME treats my Nextcloud sync app (which I NEED to be running at all times) as if it was malware or something.

Yeah I just use the web version of Office on the rare chance I need it, which is almost never.

Using the same chip is disappointing, but if they release a smaller model with OLED it will still have a lot of customers I bet.

Most desktop environments are really efficient at what they do and minimize the background resources they take. Just checked my system and GNOME takes ~350MBs RAM (~700MB including gnome-software) and literally 0.0% CPU, it's insane. I looked up Windows 11 and it seems like it can use up to 4 GBs (!) of RAM all by itself.

Here's one