Here’s the five:

1. Everything you need, nothing you don’t
2. Better performance, lighter overheads
3. A hidden desktop experience
4. Never worry about drivers
5. Modify it to your heart’s content

And my response to each:

1. Seems kinda hand-wavy to me, so I’ll boil this down to lower bloat (i.e. lower disk and mem usage by the OS)
2. This is very much YMMV, and for Steam Deck specifically, it’s comparing a tuned the system to an OOTB experience; surely other handhelds tune their systems too
3. I’m pretty sure this is true for other handhelds, but I haven’t used them personally so I don’t know
4. This seems very solvable, and not an inherent Windows issue; large enterprises manage drivers and whatnot centrally, surely a handheld can too
5. Surely this is true for Windows devices, no? I’m guessing more people are comfortable customizing Windows handheld PCs vs the Steam Deck simply because more people are familiar with customizing Windows than Linux

I just want to say that I have been Linux only for well over 10 years (aside from macOS at work), and I absolutely prefer a Linux-based handheld to a Windows-based one. However, I think this article is vastly overselling what Valve has done on the Steam Deck, after all, this is a pretty serious thing to brush aside:

On top of that, some games will never run on Linux, no matter what. Games like Call of Duty with a custom anti-cheat won’t run, and that’s a symptom of how open Linux is.

The end user usually doesn’t care about how open their gaming-specific device is, they care if it plays the games they want.

I love Linux and my Steam Deck, and I’ll recommend it every chance I get, but overselling it just leads to frustration. If you temper expectations, people will be pleasantly surprised at how good it is.