fs, scheduler

So performance? Idk, I zone out or go get a glass of water whenever something's compiling or some bloatware is trying to launch. Probably like 0.x second improvements (in addition to the random "faster paths" the maintainers add from time to time regardless).

drivers, mesa/vulkan

I have an AMD APU, kind of sharing a lot of code with the Deck hardware. GPU suspend was broken twice (when the machine was new + 2 weeks ago). Oh, and whenever my uptime exceeds like 10 days or so, it sometimes decides to wake up to a black screen with my cursor (and the entire plymouth shutdown screen) being colored stripes. Now, the popularity of the Steam Deck made navigating issue trackers near impossible. Constant dump of random bullshit daily. Lots of shit is being closed as duplicate of other bugs which are slightly different but "close enough".

gamescope

If we are talking about impact, may as well mention that they could have forked cage or something for the compositor.

proton

Cool. The ReactOS/Wine people do most of the work on matters other than obscure graphics and application specific quirks though. One must really hate themselves to understand Win32 internals in the first place, so you have to give them credit. Also, Valve's fork is often pretty outdated to upstream which is why lots of people are using the third party fork of the fork that rebases with the original (Proton GE).

Honestly same. I dabbled with Arch back in college but that was over a decade ago, and I just kept going back to Windows for everything but especially for gaming.

The deck was a bit of an eye-opener, I hadn't kept up with linux news basically since I deleted that old Arch install, and I had no idea things were this good over here now. The deck convinced me to give a desktop distro another shot, and I've been daily driving CachyOS for over a year since.

You mean in 2018? When the Index was being developed top secret?