Because you can, pretty much.

That’s the nice thing with an open platform like that, everyone can make another just as good. Valve did a great job making it good and reliable for the average gamer, but it’s also just a PC. A PC made to run Linux. There’s no reason you can’t… just install another distro, replicate some of the configurations, and run your favorite distro on it!

And it’s good, people experiment and make cool mods and tweaks. Valve has taken a lot of things the community did to their deck and made it an official feature because it’s cool and fun. People make cool themes, they figure out how to make some games work.

It’s just like any other Linux distro choice: which one do you vibe the best with for what you want to do on it. For some people that’s a handheld console that just works and plays your games and runs SteamOS.