You just described Bazzite. You can literally install the KDE version, same as you’d find on a Deck, and get right to gaming. No tinkering required. Steam is installed by default, Bluetooth works as expected, USB controllers work when plugged in.
The only time you might “tinker” with gaming is when you want to install, say, an emulator or Heroic from the Discovery store (flatpak) to play your non-Steam games, all of which is optional.
SteamOS isn’t going to offer significant benefit, except it might get Valve-specific fixes before they upstream the patches. If you’re waiting around, expecting SteamOS to be some shift in the distro landscape, I think you’re going to be disappointed.
LwL@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
These days you can do that on fucking arch (from the point of “have a usable DE with internet access” onwards ofc, which is the point most distros get you out of the box). Install steam, check the setting to show windows games with proton, and it just works. At most need GEProton sometimes but I doubt that’s different on SteamOS.
No doubt SteamOS is the most optimized for that experience but there really isn’t a lot of friction for gaming on steam in general these days.