I find it interesting that Arch is considered a gaming-focus Linux distro. Is that really the case? From my experience, I've see Arch as a general-purpose bleeding-edge distro.
Arch is the only distro I've tried that just works out of the box. It's the only distro where Optimus/Prime/Bumblebee actually works and doesn't just run the GPU at full bore all the time.
All of my games work as well as you could hope with this hardware, with no configuration or tinkering up front.
Arch has been the absolute most stable and fast OS I have ever used, bar none. My current installation is the longest I've ever gone without reinstalling the OS, including windows. It's definitely not the most ergonomic OS, but it just works, and it works every time.
Specifically, I use the Garuda flavor. It's advertised as being specifically for games, but I don't know what's special about it other than the garish "gamer" RGB default desktop theme. I'm gonna try Cinnamon next.
Everytime you run into an issue you'll not know if its related to Arch itself or something the Garuda installer has messed with. Which is why people on the ArchLinux forums and IRC aren't eager to help others using a derivative.
Garuda is one of the worst examples with the team being so unprofessional. As an example their emberassingly small wiki contains emoticons. Manjaro already gets shame for not properly informing users of the risks of the AUR, and Garuda absolutely discards security entirely by using a third party repository with pre-compiled AUR packages...
All-in-all you get a whole lot of uncertainty for having some stuff pre-configured. Something a simple install script (that you can actually review and modify) could cover as well.
As for Cinnamon, it's nice I like it.
I picked Garuda because my requirements were:
1. Arch
2. Has desktop environment out of the box
It was the first one I found and looked adequately shiny.
I just really dislike raw Arch and having to install my DE from scratch. It always feels like I'm doing something wrong and I'm never sure I configured everything correctly.
For new hardware, not being closer to bleeding edge sometimes means your WiFi, Ethernet, etc don’t work.
Correct.
I own Steam Deck and I also use Arch as my main desktop distro. While Steam Deck uses Arch as a base, it is slightly tweaked. The file system is read only out of the box and you are supposed to upgrade it together with SteamOS from the Steam settings menu. When connected to monitor and switched to desktop mode, it runs regular KDE desktop. If you want to keep it a vanilla SteamOS (with read only system) but still install apps, you can install flatpaks (for example from KDE application store).