The steamdeck works so well, because Valve spent a LOT of effort fixing AMD, wayland and pipewire issues for their handheld. Some of that then trickles down to other machine other parts don't(like sleep, and audio). For example, they have a proper filter chain for their speakers and microphone.

Since recently buying an AMD based laptop I've come to realize how much better Intel's software support, both in Linux AND in windows is. And that patterns moves all across AMD product lines.

For example, they pressured all vendors to drop S3, dropped it from Phoenix and went all in with Microsoft's s2idle without any clear way to support it. As a result you have multiple vendors with half working idle implementations, overheating and other bugs.

Intel has also vastly surpassed AMD is their ML stack, even though their GPU's are less powerful.