There are two drivers for AMD on Linux. There's the open source driver, Mesa, and there's the proprietary AMD driver, called AMDGPU. I'm not certain which drive

There are two drivers for AMD on Linux. There's the open source driver, Mesa, and there's the proprietary AMD driver, called AMDGPU. I'm not certain which driver Valve is using on Steam Deck (I've never had to look), but if they're funding Mesa, I'm guessing they're using Mesa. Unfortunately, some of AMD's GP-compute infrastructure is only supported on Linux through the proprietary driver. I believe these are ROCm and HIP. I'm not sure about OpenCL. I'm not 100% sure what Blender uses for AMD acceleration, but if it's ROCm, you'd need the AMDGPU driver instead of Mesa. Could have some of these details wrong, but I believe that's the gist of it. You can, of course, install other OS on the Deck.