Comment by hbn
I'm trying to word this without sounding dismissive of Bazzite for simply not being from a big company with money to throw around. I'm sure the people making it are doing great work. But I just don't get the feeling it's anywhere near the position it needs to be a "real platform" that could disrupt Windows. It has to be looked at from the perspective of publishers, and whether it's worth their money to target a new platform.
Valve has good, stable funds to pay a team full time to build and support Steam OS which, over a long period of time and with enough user uptake, I think will have better chances of getting publishers on board with ensuring their games work on something that isn't Windows. Hell, they could probably make deals with publishers to say "hey, here's a pile of money to make sure your game works on Steam OS day 1, and put it in all the ads" and get the ball rolling that way.
Gaming is a tough space to crack. I think Valve's money and their history of supporting the most popular gaming platform on PC inspires more trust needed to make their platform a standard target.
The PLATFFORM from a game publisher's perspective is still going to be Steam/Proton on Linux... More likely than not, it's all still mostly going to be Win32/64, but with improved Proton testing/targetting... this will be for SteamOS or Steam on other Linux distros... it's the same.
From your perspective you aren't waiting around for "completion" ... in terms of scope, most of it is built on efforts from Fedora/Redhat with enough customization to make it friendlier to gamers. Linux distros aren't like Windows, they share a lot and are largely interoperable or compatible with a few major camps.
But very little of this affects what will happen with games. Your experience with Steam on pretty much any Linux distro is likely to be as good or better than Steam on SteamOS.
Edit: to clarify, there are differences between Linux distros... but the fact is, that Steam on pretty much any modern/updated distro will be a very similar experience wether it's "SteamOS" or something else that you aren't having to wait around for. For that matter, you can put together a current AMD system with up to a 9070XT and run SteamOS today, the hardware is supported and you don't actually have to wait for it if you don't want to. You may find the experience better with a desktop distro, if you plan on using it more or as much of a desktop as game platform. And more so if you want to run a non-amd GPU.