Bazzite is fine. It’s serviceable enough to get the job done. The hardware is supported through a bunch of different emulation tools and bespoke applications like HandHeld Daemon for hooking into power draw and managing extra buttons.

Bazzite is based on the Holographic base that SteamOS uses, but opts for a Fedora-based immutable back-end over Arch. Running SteamOS itself is going to be better once Valve implements native support for all of these things that are covered by HandHeld Daemon, at least in theory.

Due to the non-optimal nature of both Windows and Linux at this stage, they tend to perform about equally.

I get that the Fediverse is disproportionately made up of Linux users, but the reality right now is just that no operating system is fine-tuned for the hardware its running on besides SteamOS and the Deck itself. It’s not better yet, but it’s getting better at a massive clip - which is above and beyond whatever Microsoft is doing (looks like nothing) to improve their software for the form factor.

As long as you don’t use the sd card slot

The original Ally was pretty debatable hardware wise when compared to the deck. It was more powerful, but had worse battery life (especially in low power games), worse controls, poorly designed heat routing that burned up SD cards, etc. There was also stuff like how the higher resolution screen wasnt really necessary for the screen size, and the performance hit was very significant unless you capped at 720p.