Proton works on any modern linux distro, valve only officially supports Ubuntu. However, many distros will have steam available to install. I'm using Debian for example, but you can just as well use Fedora, or any other of the popular linux distros out there.

There are also several game focused distros out there, but since you want to do more then just play games, it's perhaps best to use a regular desktop oriented distro.

not the first on yt to do this, but yeah, it works. it is quite a silly thing to do though, as now the deck is not portable anymore, just a desktop pc in a weird, unconvinient way.

i would try steamos again when they release v3, right now you're better off with just a plain linux desktop distro.

they'll have to release something, since a lot of steamos will be open source with several different licenses which require you to share the code used to make your product. so far valve has been a good open source companion, and the only closed part is the steam client itself.

you just need something like this; https://www.amazon.com/Headless-Display-Emulator-Generation-Single/dp/B07FB8GJ1Z/ref=pd_sbs_2?pd_rd_w=6dO8u&pf_rd_p=527ea27c-adf6-4b67-9c5f-265eb29e0622&pf_rd_r=2C9SSZD1ACAWF3K64XW1&pd_rd_r=9d5ab6b5-f6c9-420f-a1b2-11546004f828&pd_rd_wg=0Lx5z&pd_rd_i=B07FB8GJ1Z&psc=1

that's what i did over a year ago as well (when i also started to notice games stopped working because libraries etc got to old), enabled the debian backports repo for more recent kernel and nvidia drivers, set it up to boot directly into steam. i have only a controller connected, just as i had with SteamOS, and it works just fine.

the steam client used by steamos is the steam client everybody gets, there is nothing special about it. it just starts straight into big picture mode, but you can change it to the 'desktop' gui.

to turn pc gaming into a console exp.
gaming should be just about picking up a controller and having a good time, no need to deal with OS things.

You're better of just going with GamerOS atm, it's a community SteamOS-like distro, which is what SteamOS should have become. I've switched away from SteamOS a while ago (was a user since day one), but some of my fav games just didn't work anymore. I just went with the latest debian stable + backports as SteamOS was also based on debian. This works well.

1. it's supposed to be the best way to run games from steam, but the OS itself is not updating regularly enough, which is now causing problems with some games that no longer work.

2. yes

3. memory management is done by the linux kernel, as such there is no difference in memory mgmt between steamos or any other linux distro.

4. it was a joy to use, you only needed a controller, and everything just worked (until it became outdated)