I bought a Steam Deck, I used it a bit but honestly not as much as I expected.
I did however finally manage to dump Windows from all my machines, apart from my VR sim racing rig, and now play everything on my Linux desktop or laptop. If it doesn't run, at this point I just pick something else to play. Steam Deck has pushed the state of the art of Wine/Proton/DXVK/... so far it's mostly just a plug and play experience, I've not had any issues at all. Often runs more reliably than native Linux ports.
I've seen some post that FOSS dev worked for Valve as contractor. It's great that my payment for games finally go for FOSS developers and they develop FOSS. Also they expand real world usage of GNU/Linux (Linux Desktop!). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35605865
I wasn't a big fan of Steam so I've bought games from random store, but I'll buy any games from Steam as possible.
Like you, I have completely switched over to Arch Linux on my desktop and laptop apart from Windows for my VR sim racing rig. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to play iRacing from Linux, but that day is not today. Everything else has been extremely smooth.
Depends on the games maybe, I don't play competitive online games. Most stuff that doesn't work is because of anti cheat or DRM being intentionally incompatible because it's impossible to guard against kernel modifications on Linux.
have you ever tried using a vr headset, wheel and/or pedals with linux? if so, how was your experience thus far, especially in terms of out of the box impression?
I did however finally manage to dump Windows from all my machines, apart from my VR sim racing rig, and now play everything on my Linux desktop or laptop. If it doesn't run, at this point I just pick something else to play. Steam Deck has pushed the state of the art of Wine/Proton/DXVK/... so far it's mostly just a plug and play experience, I've not had any issues at all. Often runs more reliably than native Linux ports.