Just got a steam deck and immediately checked out the desktop mode, and I was somewhat surprised to see KDE and pacman as opposed to GNOME and apt, I have nothing against the former though a strong preference for the latter, anyone know why Volvo went in this direction?
For the KDE part, something I haven't heard most people mention is the wayland support and how fast they are to pioneer and implement new protocols. DRM leasing is the reason why Gnome can't do VR games and I forget why they wouldn't implement it, but the why doesn't really matter for a company focused on gaming. There are quite a number of protocols that have followed this same story with Gnome.
Didn't GNOME support Wayland way earlier than KDE ?
Yes, but that isn't really relevant to the current state of things. I still think Gnome's wayland implementation is ahead in some ways, but why would that matter when various game related stuff doesn't work on Gnome. We are talking about a gaming company here.