I specifically did so I can use any game service beyond Steam without hacking stuff. I know I can turn on my Ally and use Steam, Gamepass, roms, sail the high seas, virtually anything, out of the box.
There’s no “hacking” involved to use non-steam services on the Deck. Except maybe gamepass but since Microsoft is making that shitty now is it really that important lol?
If you want to play anything with anticheat, you can’t on a steamdeck. And gamepass was my number one reason to not get a steamdeck. I play Xbox too, I might as well get the most bang for my buck if I already subscribe.
Sea of Thieves has a shit ton of Tumbleweed reviews on protondb. You should read them. There’s also a fair amount of other distros that say they work fine. Now my own anecdotal experience, I couldn’t get anything to work on my arch install. But I was dumb as hell and didn’t want to use a desktop environment on a desktop.
About half of games with anticheat work on Linux: https://areweanticheatyet.com/