There were previous leaks that were covered here about it, here are two articles on it:
As with anything like this, it's not 100%, but it's pretty much confirmed that valve is working on getting x86 vr games to run for ARM hardware, which is enough for most people to assume that an ARM VR headset is coming.
I would guess steam deck 2 will be x86, I'm assuming that valve is already working on hardware for it. We do know that Valve is working on a new VR headset that will be ARM based though, and that they're working on an ARM compatibility layer for it. If the early testing of the VR headset is promising enough I could imagine valve pivoting to make the next Deck ARM based, but that will probably cause a longer delay before we get a Deck 2.
Unfortunately common issue with a lot of Epic store games, many don't work or have issues when compared to the steam version. The protonDB reports are all 6months+ in age as well, so it's possible something has changed with the game in that time. Found this discussion on reddit, where it sounds like it runs for most people but with terrible performance.
I know some Epic games take a really long time at first load. The Epic version of gloomhaven could take 1-2 hours to load the first time if I recall right, but after that first really long load time it would work fine. I'm assuming it's compiling shaders or something the first time.
For trackball, I personally find a finger controlled trackball much more intuitive and easy to use compared to a thumb controlled one. The trackpads on the deck and steam controller are great, but they generally are thumb only unless you have some really funky grip.
You can use any mouse. Also after an initial learning curve, trackball mice are a very couch friendly mouse.
It's cool that the switch 2 has a mouse mode, but it's not very ergonomic and it's pretty limited in terms of comfortable inputs.
Ars Technica is generally excellent in my experience, one of the better tech news websites.
It's distributed through flatpak, so yes, it's available on Ubuntu or any linux distro that supports flatpak.
It is focused on controller support, so it might not be ideal for an ubuntu desktop computer, but that just depends on your use case.
According to the article this has a built in adblocker.
That can work with any website, so you can probably just install jellyfin, have your local media hosted at 127.0.0.1:8188, and play that in the picture in picture plugin.
I think it was supported really early on (or was supposed to be supported), but it hasn't worked for basically the entire time I've had my Deck. I don't play with keyboard very often so it never impacted me, but I know I've heard people complain about it.
From looking it up, it's usually a BA, but it can be a BS depending on focus.
Source is this video:
Windows Was The Problem All Along - Dave2D
We could obviously compare performance between windows and steamOS before on the steam deck, or between windows and Bazzite on other handhelds. But this is the first time we have had official windows and SteamOS builds for the same hardware.
Here's the old page:
Here's the link: https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/
Credit to @abobla@lemm.ee for the post.
Supposedly they were working on an inhouse one, and then changed directions to just do software tweaks for other companies hardware instead.
It definitely needs some background process limiting, comparing official windows vs official steamOS on that Lenovo legion Go showed pretty terrible performance impact from running windows.