Safe and conservative isn't what's needed for gaming. For example, a lot of the tricks that Proton relies on explicitly use patches to the Linux kernel to do w

Safe and conservative isn't what's needed for gaming. For example, a lot of the tricks that Proton relies on explicitly use patches to the Linux kernel to do with FUTEX_WAIT implementation, which have only been patched into mainline since 5.16 afaik, as well as bleeding edge Mesa/xorg versions, the current state of things is that it makes sense for them to base on a rolling release where they can frequently push system images with bleeding edge versions to the deck hardware. Maybe a few years down the line it'd make more sense to base on something more stable like BSD, but things are moving very quickly in Linux+wine gaming support and it's actually helpful right now to be on experimental/unstable versions of certain things.