Working class people at large don't know about these alternatives,
You mean only the elite know about Linux? Preposterous!
*proceeds to clean monocle
Jokes aside, it might be a good time to teach and learn. Or pay, or have less security moving forward.
It was a staple of the "working class" to be resourceful, to know to repair stuff. It's on Microsoft best interest that you change the computer, that you pay another OEM license, that they can drop support for older hardware... And this will happen again with windows 12.
Currently, you're right. But it's a bad move, I think, moving forward for valve.
They have already confirmed they want steamOS to be a distro everybody can install on any computer. Being more limited than most distros is going to make it a hard choice to pick. On the deck, it's fine tuned to that hardware. What is going to offer that Bazzite won't replicate a few months afterwards, while offering a better general OS experience?
I think that just having layers and a recovery partition that can restore the system while preserving steam games (even if removing all configs) would increase the appeal a lot.