Fubarberry already posted a SteamDeckHQ article about this but I wanted to highlight the direct sources.
Per Valve in their Steam Machine FAQ:
If I don’t get a Steam Machine right away, is there anything else I can do?
Thanks to the openness of the PC platform, there are lots of options for devices that will allow you to run games natively or streamed to your TV. There are many PC sites and communities out there that can help you with that. For our part, we are continuing to work toward enabling SteamOS to be used on more hardware than just ours. In fact, with the newly-released SteamOS 3.8, you can run the same code and operating system as Steam Machine on your own living-room PC using whatever PC parts you want: learn more here. Right now, only AMD GPUs are supported, but we’re working on expanding support for the future.
I’m also interested in people’s thoughts on this. Also compared to nobara? I’m on nobara now, and I’m happy with it but unfortunately it was enough work messing with gamescope and hdr settings that I couldn’t recommend it to the non-tech savvy yet
What issues did you encounter? i had problems when trying to use Flatpak for everything - Heroic didn’t recognize Gamescope or Mangohud, even when installing the demanded versions. The moment i ditched the flatpaks and went for native packages everything started working without a hitch. The hard part was finding out that the issue was using flatpaks.
In steam some games ran really poorly and washed out because hdr wasn’t working. After some googling I found out that I’d probably have to run a gamescope command in the game’s launch options, and more googling and trial and error to get that working and hdr sorta dialed in. It’s good now, I get great performance and the hdr looks okay to my eyes, but it certainly didn’t go as smoothly as when I played the same games on my steamdeck and they “just worked”. Granted, I had the lcd one without hdr