and figure out which distro would be best for it. My steam deck is great and I want basically the exact same thing but more powerful at the cost of not being a handheld.

Bazzite might be your jam. They’re a sort-of competitor (?) to SteamOS, as in they have distros for handhelds in the same way Valve has with SteamOS (which they are now leasing out to manufacturers like lenovo). But they also have versions for laptops and desktop PCs.

I’ve been using their PC (nvidia) version for a week now, and it’s been wonderful. Of course I probably wouldn’t have made the switch if Valve hadn’t helped pave the way and made proton so powerful. Also I probably wouldn’t have switched if I hadn’t given up on LoL and Battlefield (kernel-level anticheat).

Same here! I’ve been dabbling with various linux distros a week here and a week there over the past decade. Now that I’ve finally given up on the few games that need kernel-level anticheats (like LoL and Battlefield), I’m staying permanently as all my other games work great. I probably wouldn’t have jumped ship yet if steam (proton) wasn’t where it’s at now, though.

Since windows is on my smallest and slowest SSD I figured I’ll just keep the dual-boot option indefinitely, mainly for helping friends and family troubleshoot windows-bullshit, or for the (now very) rare moments I need an app that doesn’t exist or have an equivalent on linux.