They could have easily crammed the Steam Deck full of stuff to make it hard to use for piracy - locking down everything, making it usable only to play games you legitimately own, force you to go through who knows what hoops in order to play games on it. That’s what Nintendo or Apple or most other companies do....
Probably not. Although I can’t buy a Steam Deck in my country, Linux is my daily driver on my gaming PC. In my experience, buying games on steam is genuinely much much easier than piracy on Linux. Even just trying to run Windows games purchased elsewhere (such as GOG) to run in wine is much more difficult than steam. There are no other game stores that are anywhere near as good on Linux.
I feel like the Steam Deck is the best proof of Gabe Newell's quote that "piracy is a service issue."
They could have easily crammed the Steam Deck full of stuff to make it hard to use for piracy - locking down everything, making it usable only to play games you legitimately own, force you to go through who knows what hoops in order to play games on it. That’s what Nintendo or Apple or most other companies do....