I did it. For a few years now I’ve wanted to make the jump but lazyness and a bit of worry that my main game wouldn’t work very well kept me from it.
Then some effing windows update caused ridiculous stuttering on games (or maybe it was a auto-update of some other hidden thing, I couldn’t figure it out) so I decided that if I needed a system wipe, might as well as try gaming on linux.
Honestly? Much easier than I expected. Install Steam, turn two options on and 90% of your library is ready to go. I had to tinker with getting freesync to work (ended up just switching to wayland, which just worked) but other than the plugins I use for my main game requiring a bit of more work, smooth as butter really.
So yeah, if you are a lazy gamer like I am, next time you do a system wipe or get a new computer, try installing linux first. Don’t even bother Dual booting it, if you don’t like it just reinstall (setup your usb drive with ventoy and the images you want to try out.)
I recommend endeavouros - it’s on arch (personally my favorite, btw), has a bunch of desktop environments you can pick from that come configured nicely out of the box, nice presets and well commented configs, etc. Install and setup are super easy, they also include installing your driver’s and such.
For getting games to work, most games work out of the box on steam (just make sure to enable proton for all titles and you’re set). Some games will require some changes to the launch command which you can super easily find with just searching {game title} Linux. There are some that straight up don’t work, and most likely no tinkering will fix that - but it’s primarily fps and competitive games with kernal level anticheat. It’s getting better with fewer and fewer games using it though. Since you already have a steak deck you already know the process most likely so you should be able to hit the ground running