I haven’t run into any limitations of the file system and I hardly even know what pacman is. And I haven’t felt ‘controlled’ by Valve, certainly not to the extent of a console or even Windows/Mac. I can sudo whatever I want. I’m sure you have a use case, but I’m still just not seeing it.
Are their proton versions just proton GE? To what extent does it actually run better?
Neither is the steam deck user base, or would-be Linux converts. What’s your point?