It’s not simply “some strange reason”. There will be a lot of press coverage when they release a desktop version so naturally they want it to be as good an experience as possible. They may not ever get another chance for that kind of coverage after all, and they wouldn’t want SteamOS’s reputation to be damaged (again) because it wasn’t good enough for most people to use (again).

Steam input doesn’t work with VKB joysticks, lol.

edit: figured out how to open the quick access menu on my laptop and I can’t change my power levels. So yeah, as I suspected Bazzite can’t do either of those things. I doubt any other distro can either.

Lol, I’d be surprised if they could do either of those things, let alone both. I know Bazzite can’t; I have it on my laptop and that shit can’t even update itself properly.

Really? Which distro has a button I can press to open a menu to change the power budget on my Ryzen 5 5600? Which distro has everything configured for me to be able to use my VKB joysticks without needing to mess with the registry in the proton prefixes of Windows games?

There is no distro that supports arbitrary hardware as well as SteamOS supports the Steam Deck.

It’s not as simple as just releasing something. They need to develop it first, and making it a good experience with arbitrary hardware is actually pretty hard.

I read this as “SteamOS is bad because of reason I personally don’t like that many people don’t understand, so do more research about Linux”

It’s easy to dismiss this as something that won’t ever matter to you, but this is something that can cause problems in all sorts of ways even for gamers. The first thing that came to mind is not being able to install custom drivers to support weird hardware, like a racing wheel or something.