Because it’s not “just a fancy interface”?

It makes the entire process from purchase to playing completely painless, on top of a large community of people, guides, achievements, etc. I think I’d maybe improve my performance by like…a fraction of a frame per second. Good trade off.

And as others have mentioned, Lutris does a good job if you don’t want steam.

I just wish Wayland weren’t so weird about screensavers. It’s it so much to ask to be able to lock my account when I have a screensaver activated?*

*This is what I’m told is the issue when it’s brought up on KDE, i really don’t have the wherewithal to actually dig into it. Could be talking out of my ass on this. Hope I am at least.

Bazzite and Chimera are “SteamOS-like” distros that are more focused on providing a game console like experience.

They’re immutable operating systems, and the primary UI is Steam. Definitely usable as a desktop PC but that isn’t really their target niche.