Not too soon (if you wanna run it in bare metal):

https://www.xda-developers.com/i-tried-hannah-montana-linux-in-2025/

Not so good at ears, though.

"Freedesktop SDK" means the user is running Steam via Flatpak. They could be on any distro.

Without the Steam Deck there'd be 27% fewer Linux users. So while that would indeed mean Linux wouldn't yet be 3% of the total Steam userbase, I think you will find that 27% is not the majority.

GamingOnLinux aggregates this data in a nicer way and as you can see there, the total Linux market share has gone from <1% five years ago to the 3% it is now. If that increase was mainly thanks to the Steam Deck, it would have to make up more like 75% of the Linux userbase rather than only 27%.

Instead, as others have pointed out, SteamOS's share has actually gone down rather than up, which is a natural consequence of the Steam Deck being relatively old now so fewer are being sold.

I can't say having to fiddle around with Proton versions is exactly intuitive, though it has gotten better since last I tried it a year or so ago.

It is still not quite as smooth as it is on Windows, and I have tech-normie friends who want to do nothing more than download and press play.

Bazzite offers KDE or GNOME, and in the menu mentions KDE is what is used in SteamOS.

I installed Bazzite on my HTPC recently. It was the worst install process I've seen in over ten years of using Linux. I shall enumerate the problems I had:

1. The image is weirdly large, it's like 9GB in size. It takes awhile to download and a weirdly long time to write to a USB stick.
2. Once written, you boot the image, and GRUB has the options to Install Bazzite or Test Media And Install Bazzite. By default, Test Media is selected. It always fails this test.
3. If you use the typical non-live environment image, the scaling is tiny on a 4k monitor, and there's no way to adjust this.
4. If you use the live environment image (in beta at time of writing), it might just lock up. I had that happen twice just while clicking through the Anaconda installer.
5. The Anaconda installer, which I think they inherited from Fedora, was I think designed by one of the contrarian idiots who work for Gnome. There's a DONE button up in the far upper left hand corner of the screen that sometimes acts as a back button, sometimes acts as a forward button. You have to move the mouse from the top corner of the screen to the center of the screen a lot, for no reason. The top-left corner of the screen is a dumb place to put a DONE button because most languages read top to bottom, left to right, the DONE button is where a START button should go.
6. There isn't a simple way to tell it "put / on this drive, put /home on that drive." There's an automatic installer which will do god knows what...fail, most likely. There's a "custom" partition dialog which I couldn't make heads or tails of, and then there's a "custom advanced" one that lets you set the size and position of each partition to the byte. Doing it this way apparently REQUIRES you to not only set up a /boot/efi partition, but also a /boot partition separate from /root.
7. If you're in the habit of putting /, you know, operating system and software, on one drive, and /home on another drive, you have to learn from osmosis that part of Bazzite's immutableness means that there is no /home, there's a /var/home symlinked to /home.

And if it doesn't randomly lock up, you've got Bazzite installed!

Bazzite markets itself as a newbie friendly Linux. They've got that configurator on their website that gives you a little Cosmo quiz about what system you have, what desktop you want etc. which is good! That is good user friendly design. But the actual software you get rattles like a Chrysler. How many noobs are going to bounce right off that?

EndeavourOS has that kind of menu during the install process. A few screenshots and a brief explanation of each option.

I thought it was nice. It’s something I want to see more with other distros. The DE is what most people will notice about the OS either way.

I agree with the other guy, that's too much choice. People don't want to deal with it.

Ooh, Lenovo is a much bigger deal.

Yeah, even more casual games like Balatro are proof of that, despite how easily you can port a game of that nature otherwise, people will choose to use proton because it's still able to sync with their progress and symlinking is too inconvenient to consider unless you're running like 2gb ram or something.