Valve appear to have some pretty ambitious future plans for Steam, as we've seen recently a leak (and not for the first time) that Valve has plans for ARM64 and Android support on Linux.
What would an official steamOS desktop do that bazzite can’t? Unless you need commercial support because you are selling steam machines I don’t see how a official release would be of advantage.
I think there's just people that trust Valve more than Linux in general.
SteamOS on the deck is extremely foolproof, and people who are otherwise scared of Linux seem to think SteamOS magically fixes every perceived issue with desktop Linux.
Desktop mode is kind of funky, though. You need to open steam to type on the on-screen keyboard, lol. App store got patched and it's better, but sometimes the apps get stuck downloading and I need to open up the command line to make them install
My brother plays games on Windows. I tried to convert him to Linux like two times, but he doesn't want to do it. He doesn't even play multiplayer games. Just single-player and co-op games. So Anticheat wouldn't be a problem. When I said to him that Steam is releasing their own Linux distro, he said: Sure, I will try that.
That was almost 3 years ago and there still isn't official steamos for desktop.
SteamOS at the end of the day just is an immutable distro with game mode for the steam deck. Bazzite does the same for PCs. I get that there is some level of brand recognition with Steam, but I think most people (including me) would take a while to notice there is something of when they are handed a steam deck with bazzite
Yes it is, so theoretically people can just install Arch with KDE and Steam and get a similar setup. However, there is something to be said about a supported OS versus Arch Linux's community support which tends to have little patience for people who aren't well informed about the workings of their OS.
For the implications, I believe it would create a first class commercial level competition for Windows. It would open the door for a vendor trusted platform that implemented all the anti-cheat technologies. Paving the way to lift the virtual Linux ban on first day AAA games compatibility.
This is what I was getting at. Sure, most games can be run with Proton fine and well, but if anti-cheat is code for "run Windows or else", a lot of games are just unplayable, forcing gamers to at least dual boot with Windows.