I found it very annoying and restricting. Most significantly being restricted to flatpak. For example I failed at installing whonix and couldn't get rust and vscode to work together.

If I didn't plan to get rid of by steam deck, I'd install a different distro in it. I definitely wouldn't install it on a desktop, support for the deck's keyboardless form factor is the only reason I might choose SteamOS over a normal distro.

Though I didn't know about distrobox then, perhaps that works better.

It's good if you use Distrobox and it comes with it.

I mean it literally is not meant to be used as a general distro for a desktop machine so I'm guessing not very good.