I think they’re showing us how mature user-facing Linux in 2025 really is. With a little focus and investment on the UX for the end user on top of the open source core OS it has already beat any console OS by a mile.
It does not use any of the popular desktop environments (unless you drop into Desktop Mode). It heavily curates hardware, kernel, and drivers to keep the platform from breaking and install with sane (performance) defaults for gaming. It doesn't rely on a common package manager.
Beside a Steam Deck I also use a Linux PC for gaming and even with 25 years of Linux experience I still struggle sometimes to keep hardware acceleration working after a driver update, sometimes spending an evening of troubleshooting instead of gaming. Certain parts of the desktop environment sometimes lock up to the point where I have to SSH into the PC to fix it. It's like owning a vintage car in a certain way.
And yes, I prefer all of that over the Windows experience, but it's not seamless and not simple enough for anyone to just jump into.
You can look for things like "nvidia drm broken" and find thousands of threads of people all types of problems spanning decades, meaning; old and new. Some of them are pure driver issues caused by NVIDIA but that doesn't matter because we're not trying to assign blame, but we're trying to see if the ecosystem is "mature".
Their package management also isn’t that exotic. It’s a lot like Fedora Silverblue where the OS is an immutable image and user software is installed with Flatpak.
In essence Linux suffers from a Lisp curse. Whenever two OS nerds disagreed on something they made their own slightly different distro.
This means wasted effort on multiple DE, window managers, app flavors, installed libraries. To this day, almost no two distros can agree on baseline libraries every Linux must have.
It's only a problem if you think it is. In practice I use at least 3 or 4 different distros on a daily basis and I never have any issue juggling between them. For most of the typical use cases it does not even matter, and on the desktop side flatpak resolves many issues.
No. It's a problem, if you as distro maker support non-technical consumers as well.
Imagine troubleshooting Windows but you also have to figure out which DE, WM, libraries the user updated and so on.
> desktop side flatpak resolves many issues
You mean AppImage, Snap, etc.
And if there was such a nightmare to create a distro, how come there are so many?
If a free Linux distribution is more successful, its resources don't scale accordingly.
Predation: win-lose
Competition: lose-lose
This is how dynamically coupled systems work.
Back in the 90s when linux came out and started getting traction, Richard Stallman was adamant that people should call the operating system GNU/Linux , because Linux was only the kernel, but mlst of the userland utilities were the GNU software (which were planning to make a full OS like GNU/Hurd).
Some people made fun of that, and I was just kind of paying the joke.