I've had mine for about a week now, and am using it more than I use my laptop. The "desktop" mode works more than well enough for web browsing and such.
The biggest thing that changed for me was learning that you can use both trackpads on the keyboard at the same time, and use the trigger buttons to "press" a key - or to press shift if you use the opposite trigger from the side your finger is moving.
Not sure about PS5.
That doesn't mean it's running BSD. For example, MacOS runs a non-BSD kernel with lots of BSD networking code added on-top. It is not a BSD-based Operating System but it does use BSD code to create it's environment. I would not for a single second believe that the PS4 runs an unmodified FreeBSD kernel. There is just no upstream code to support this claim.
The same can't be said of the PS; the PS isn't a desktop computer.
That's the whole point. Probably 99% of computer (anything that uses a processor I guess qualifies a computer these days) users in this world don't really care what's running underneath as long it gets the job done. If something can run linux underneath and can still pass as acceptable that's a huge win I think.
SteamDecks are indistinguishable from PCs, since they run more or less exactly the same software as a Linux desktop/laptop would.
At best it would be a general purpose mobile device, but even that is rather contrived. How many users do you imagine are using a steam deck as a substitute for a desktop or a different mobile device? I would guess something very close to 0.
Also, the Steam Deck's OS is by far the closest you can get to a traditional Linux distro since it's GNU+Linux under the hood. The built-in desktop mode is extremely close to a basic KDE Arch install, especially after you disable read-only mode. Android doesn't have as full-featured of a desktop experience unless we count Samsung DeX and even then display out is available on a vast minority of devices. iOS has no native display out and iPadOS doesn't even support normal 16:9 screens without black borders. The issue with all of the above devices is that their "desktop" modes are janky afterthoughts while on the Steam Deck it's a core feature.
Also, the deck does not replicate a subset of the desktop experience, it just contains a desktop experience. Unless the KDE desktop is not a desktop now. If that's the case - it runs windows.
But Steam Deck is just running a fork of Arch not some other operating system. From analytics perspective it's indistinguishable to any Linux PC. Also IIRC you can just connect it a display which would turn into a desktop PC.
Is it contrived? They've shown, in their official marketing videos, demonstrations of the steam deck being hooked up to an external monitor and being used to run KDE and Windows 10.
It’s an arbitrarily defined category of computer, and this statistics site doesn’t mention how they’ve specified that definition, but it seems they haven’t included any server, mobile/handheld, or gaming console devices at all, not just the steamdeck.
If laptops get to be included (which they usually are), then steamdeck gets to be included.
It doesn't replicate "some subset" of the desktop experience. It does everything a small tower can, plus things it can't do.
You won't use it as a daily driver in handheld mode. The virtual keyboard covers half of the screen, the touchscreen is unusable as a mouse and touchpads are inconvenient.
Ordinary laptops don't have these problems.
Any source for this?