They still do a good job with build quality and I use them for work. I also use framework 13 as my personal computer, it is great and I like it but it does not feel as premium as my work laptop. It is probably a trade off for modularity though
My honest opinion is it is a nice Arch based distro with a gui installer
No DE just swaywm, I think you can benefit from window managers like i3 or sway for low resource utilization
I have been using a framework 13 for a year now, happy with it so far.
The best way is to use nix 🤙🏻
I think you can use usbip to share any usb device that is connected on your linux desktop to steam deck (or any other pc) over the same network.
I guess shit just work