Gabagoolzoo
At this moment in time, Bazzite is just straight up a better experience than SteamOS. Fedora backend with rpm-ostree is way better than what Valve has going on. And for Steam Deck, GNOME just makes more sense for touch interfaces.
I spent a few minutes going over old interviews and didn't find anything insinuating that would be "soon". Most I could find was:
We actually want to work with them to make sure that, if they want to use SteamOS or offer a SteamOS based alternative, that can be done
Once it’s widely available, not only are we excited to see other manufacturers making their own handheld PC gaming devices, we’re excited to see people make their own SteamOS machines which could include small PCs that they put next to their TV
I think it's pretty silly to expect Valve to release SteamOS when it doesn't even have a (immutable) package manager, among many other missing features.
It's wild reading comments like these, because I thought they made it painfully obvious. All the headlines from that interview clearly delineated that they were talking about a "faster Steam Deck" aka a Steam Deck 2 and not a hardware refresh. Like here's a Verge article from September
"changing the performance level is not something we are taking lightly... I don’t anticipate such a leap to be possible in the next couple of years"
All that said, Valve might totally still have a Steam Deck refresh in the works that doesn’t change the performance floor. There’s a rich history of console manufacturers releasing smaller, lighter, and more power efficient versions of the same hardware...
This right here is why they do like one interview a year, lmao.
What he actually said was "We're hoping [it will be] soon", but for whatever reason people's reading comprehension skills go out the window whenever there is a Valve interview.
It's a barebones window manager (WM). Emphasis on a "tiling" window philosophy (windows by default do not overlap and open side-by-side) and keyboard-centric workflow which is great for programming. Most of the "Unix porn" posts you see are on a WM because they are highly customizable.