I know there's more to PC games than just steam, but honestly the only issue I've had playing games on the steamdeck is when there's some horrible anticheat service required by the game.
I guess the problem is that the games with anticheat also tend to be quite popular ones with some people
I thought the same thing until a couple weeks ago, then tried out EndeavourOS which is based on Arch and comes with Nvidia drivers. It's been awesome and I've been able to play whatever I want.
My favourite game was always hacking around in Wine to make games work. Once I got them working I lost interest and moved on to the next game... Now I don't have time to play games. :(
And I'd almost bet these two to three titles run fine in Windows which is exactly the point: what is Linux's advantage here concerning gaming?
When I want to play a certain title I don't want something similar because that derivate runs on Linux. That's maybe okay for casual games like a round of Solitaire where the Linux alternatives are fine.
Because it does everything I need it to do and if I run into issues I can't solve myself I know that just because of the number of people using it the problem will be known and a solution will exist.
I don't mind playing with Linux on my RPi, but having to use it daily and always having to use command lines to deal with things (thus having to search for the right command line every time) gets tiring.
For the most part Windows just works out of the box and there are things I would much rather do with my time than searching the depth of the internet to find that one person that had the same problem as me and that might or might not have found a solution to their issue...
And as other people mentioned, my computer is mostly used for gaming these days so it's easier to use the platform that's the must widely supported for that purpose.
Iirc there were some windows 10 patch tools to debloat and remove some of these annoyance from the iso and some scripts for already installed ones. Try some of them, it was pretty good when I last used it but can't remember the ones I personally used sorry.
which is ok. the cool thing about switching to linux is that you don't have to take risks(e.g. buy an expensive os/hardware) so you can try it out, switch back, wait a bit and try again. I did that and last year was the year of the linux Desktop for me (also thanks to the steam deck)