Can we just stop with the "these people have been awfully quiet the last few days". Did you scour every location? Do you think people have nothing better to do than post the same shit all the time? This is some Facebook-level copium. Like when people feel they were justified when someone died or had complications due to the Covid vaccine and then people would say, "Where are all the supporters of it now..." Just stop.

SteamOS support for hardware is in beta support. https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/65B4-2AA3-5F37-4227

Could other hardware work, sure. Potentially w/o issues. And yeah, it might be better in performance. But if issues crop up, is Meta PC going to resolve the problems? Is Meta going to contribute to SteamOS for driver support/bug fixes? If issues come up on the Steam Deck or Steam Machine... Valve are the ones you are going to address it, both hardware and software.

If you want to build your own machine, and run whatever OS on it, cool. Don't try gatekeeping/shaming people because someone wants the vendors version.