For games, just use your package manager to install Steam, then install Proton from there. (IIRC it's automatic for just the standard release version.) Steam games should mostly just work without you needing to do anything. Other games, you want to use something like Heroic or Lutris (I recommend the former) to manage them and launch them with Proton without manually doing it all every time.

If you expand on what your issues were, I'm sure plenty of people would be happy to help. Again, it should be pretty trivial, so I'm not sure what went wrong.

I can understand being frustrated, but you have to understand that your particular experience is not the norm. I'd be pretty confident saying that less than 1% of people will back out of an install half way through it or have that much of an issue installing (unless it's Arch). So it's not something that really needs to be fixed before people can start using Linux.

I didn't even have that many problems setting up a dual boot with Windows in 2006 when I was a total newbie to Linux, and I had to figure out how partitioning and swap files worked.

Just ask for help in a respectful manner on your distros forum and someone will very likely be happy to assist you.

If the community really wants us to switch, it needs to iron out all this garbage at the front door

not sure which one of us is more entitled, the "community" doesn't owe you anything

Why would you cancel the install half way through, is that something you normally do?

If you don't have the time to install it properly, don't start the process. If you do have the time see it through.

If you think you have made a mistake and can't simply back up to the step you think you messed up, just continue. Most things can be fixed after install. Worst case scenario, you will just have to reinstall.

If you backed out because you were afraid of messing up your windows partition, I highly recommend backing up all your data before you install in the first place.

In what world is that normal?

The world where the vast majority of people don't cancel installing an OS halfway through the process.

What flavor of Linux were you trying to install? My experience on endeavoros has been pretty plug and play. I imagine it would be similar on mint, Ubuntu, fedora, Debian. If it was Linux from scratch, yeah that's likely going to be frustrating.

The way I see it..

If you order pieces from people who are mostly doing carpentry as a passion and make furniture. Sure it's frustrating and you have to put in work. But you can't compare it to buying stuff from IKEA and telling everyone those carpenters need to do more of that.

SteamOS is just there to run one single application: Steam. Users see absolutely nothing of Linux. It could be running MacOS or BeOS or TempleOS and it wouldn't make the slightest difference to them.

Not that it's a bad thing, it confirms that Linux is stable and mature and that you can use it for an appliance, but that's pretty much it. And yes, you can bypass the Steam interface and run a KDE desktop (is that the UX you think of? it's available on any Linux and pretty much any Unix-like desktop), which is nice of Valve to have included. But except for the .1% who will toy with it, there isn't really much point (and yes, I did toy with it end enabled ssh, and added a few gadgets). I still wouldn't install SteamOS as a desktop system though. That's not what it's made for.