For that, check out Bluefin or Aurora. They’re all under the same umbrella as Bazzite, but with a user/developer focus instead of a gaming focus.

Bazzite lead developer here, we actually never used the flatpak. Our first release had it installed in a distrobox container on the desktop images. Deck images always had RPM Steam because Steam is essentially functioning as a desktop environment there. We moved them both to be RPM for support consistency reasons.

The very first release was actually a steam deck release, the desktop release came later.