I’ve been using Cinnamon for most of the last decade, but switched to Gnome3 recently, heavily customized to work like Cinnamon. Basically because Wayland is finally stable enough to use.
If Cinnamon gets Wayland support working well, that’s my choice. Otherwise I’ve got some Gnome3 configs that make it work pretty well, and I’d happily run it into the ground too.
So every steam deck that visits the websites that track this counts? It’s probably not many, but it’s certainly likely there are a few counted.
It’s worth noting that the barrier to entry as a maintainer depends on which distro you’re using at the time. It’s not uncommon for a distro to have a community repository system, like PPAs in Ubuntu, AUR for Arch, MPR for Debian, etc. I’m not very familiar with Mint, and couldn’t easily tell if it has its own or just uses PPAs from upstream.
It isn’t especially taxing on programming skills, and if you don’t pick too complex of a package, the Linux skills required shouldn’t be wildly above your level, but may push you to learn some new things by digging a bit deeper. I haven’t formally maintained public packages, but I’ve needed to build a few over my years using Linux, and it was easier than I’d expected to just build one. It may be easier than you think, too.
I think the biggest issue is titles; what people expect of mobile games, perpetuating itself into a weak catalog of original titles, with a few good ports. Mobile games are largely designed to be heavily-monitized, Games as a Service, and/or gacha titles… profitable design choices, but not because they make games better.
Having a more standard control scheme would help get more ports of console games, but I’d love to see more mobile games that use the existing interface/formfactor well. Pokemon Go circa 2018 was a good game that only works on mobile, and I’d love to see more of those.
Overcooked 2, Conduct Together/Deluxe. Both are tough but fair, and they’ll have to communicate effectively to do well.
Ultimate Chicken Horse is a bit more chill, more of a party game.