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The Steam Deck uses a customized Arch with KDE and Wayland. The "gaming mode" is basically Steam running in Big Picture mode, but it uses the minimal window manager gamescope to avoid running the heavy KDE UI which you don't use while gaming. The "desktop mode" is just straight up Arch with KDE and some configuration of things like joystick mouse.

I think the easy approach is:

* Install Manjaro with KDE on the computer. Configuring Arch is a pain in the ass, Manjaro does a lot of it out of the box for you. KDE makes gamepads easy to set up.
* Don't set any passwords so you can boot easily like the Deck does. The Manjaro installer forces a user password, so you have to manually blank it after installing the OS.
* You can further improve booting by enabling fastboot in your BIOS.
* Install Steam. Configure Manjaro to autostart `steam -tenfoot`. Your computer will now boot into the big picture mode which is basically the same as the deck experience.

I noticed that the Big Picture UI is a lot laggier than the Deck. I am guessing this is just Valve devs being lazy/incompetent. The games themselves don't have this problem.

My controller worked out of the box with Big Picture Mode (I just had to connect it using Bluetooth in KDE). It was even better since I get a notification when the battery is low, unlike Steam's gaming mode. In KDE itself, the controller's touchpad worked, but triggers do not issue mouse clicks like on the Deck's "desktop mode" - I don't really care since outside games I prefer using a keyboard anyway. But it is possible to remap gamepad buttons to mouse in Linux, and you could probably steal the config from the Deck's `/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/`.

Steam Deck uses a read-only filesystem for stuff outside `/home` so that they can lock it down and ship disk images as updates. I consider this a minus so I didn't bother replicating it.