From a usability perspective all the popular desktop Linux distros are barely different from each other, the things I do and the way I did them in Arch were basically the same things I was doing in Ubuntu, only with pacman instead of apt. Any operating system that requires the user actively maintain it's system stack will, at some point, likely require diving into a terminal and messing with configuration files.

The people who run into that wall and bounce off of it wouldn't be better served by Ubuntu, but an immutable OS. Fedora Silverblue, Bazzite et al.

Like the Steam Deck, too; though you're wrong about the OS's scope for hardware compatibility. SteamOS supports the Legion Go S officially, but also contains specific patches to support the ROG Ally which they have no affiliation with. Their intent for SteamOS isn't for it to stay on Valve hardware forever.

>From a usability perspective all the popular desktop Linux distros are barely different from each other

Obviously false. Rolling release distros like Arch require far more intervention. Why do you make up nonsense like that?

I'd say "far more intervention" is massively overstating the supposed problem, in practice I haven't noticed a whole lot of difference over the last few years. I run sudo pacman -Syu, I restart and it works. For those that do run into problems, there's community support available just like there is for Ubuntu as well as a bounty of resources for Arch in general.

None of this requires some trial by fire bullshit on part of end users.

In all likelihood once a year an Arch distro requires intervention by someone who knows what he is doing. For Debian that is zero, unless you are switching versions.

You forgot all the times that debian requires you to run terminal instructions just to add a new repo, to get a specific type of software that's new for a specific feature you want, instead of one that's ancient and crusty. And then the inevitable conflicts that result when you try to upgrade a system that is trying to ship two versions of e.g. openssl concurrently because the one new program needs network access and a new version of GLIBC.

I ran a single Arch Linux install concurrently for 7 years before 2020 (i.e. before the rot took hold) and needed to use the terminal to fix things less than I ever did Ubuntu around the same time period.

Well yeah; if you exclude the main maintenance task of a non-rolling distro, the rolling distro looks like it has more maintenance.

No. I run a rolling release distro, void, for years and never had to fix anything caused by system updates. It is not nonsense at all to state that this exists.

I would suggest to look a bit more at other distros outside the arch bubble before claiming such an opinion.