I believe SteamOS is designed only for the steam deck, I wouldn’t recommend it as a general purpose OS for a desktop or laptop.

I would recommend Bazzite, it’s like a general version of SteamOS. It comes with a version that boots directly into steam’s big picture mode (like SteamOS) or one that boots into the desktop (I run this on my desktop)

It also has improvments like nvidia drivers, printer drivers, package layering and because it’s built on top Fedora Atomic you can rollback the system to a stable snapshot if an update doesn’t work with your system.

I’ve been running on my desktop since September (I was in the same boat as you) and it’s been really good. A lot of the stuff I would’ve had to configure and mess around with is already setup for gaming

You might like Bazzite. Its like a general purpose version of SteamOS with layering and printers

Any specific reason you don’t want something mainstream? I would recommend a Nvidia Shield (tube). I have one for my living room tv and another for my bedroom and they are great. I also have a shield pro for my theatre room. I used to have a htpc in there but it would occasionally break on updates and wasn’t nearly as user friendly as the shield

I always thought these were pretty cool. I’m not sure how HEV compares to UV though, or if it even works