this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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It's good. The steam deck's version of steamOS is arch based, so that should tell you a lot about its capabilities.
I'd recommend choosing an Arch-based distro like Endeavour or Garuda so you don't have to go through the rigmarole of installing vanilla Arch.
While SteamOS is Arch based, i don't think they really use it the Arch way. It's run as an image based immutable OS, so they control the packages and not run at the bleeding edge.
You might run into problems more likely than SteamOS will.
Although i didnt't have problems gaming on Arch, it's not the same
I think they confirmed in an interview at one point that they don't roll with it. They take the binaries they need from it, test it and freeze it. Initially they were using Debian but ended up needing more recent package versions and apparently Arch binaries in core and extra were more suitable to their purposes than Debian testing.
Valve was using Debian way-back-when, but the pace of getting new stuff into debian proper is too glacial for Valve. Valve is putting a lot of work into "making the linux graphics stack rather good for games", and having those improvements integrated upstream quicker means that Valve can get to work on the next set of improvements.
Valve is still using Debian as the basis for their runtime environments for games (pressure vessel). Debian's slowness is great for providing a stable ABI for the parts that come into contact with (seldom maintained) game code. There is some amount of magic that goes into gluing the stable runtimes with rapidly changing stuff like Mesa.