

In many ways it was better. More organic and even the big names like google and amazon were more quirky upstarts rather than the evil megacorporations they are today.
That said lets not sugarcoat it too much. The early 2000s were edgelord central and message boards like 4chan and something awful were quite influential. Then you had gaming message boards like gamefaqs and the like. Woof so much bad trolling. Some of it funny and well done to the point of art but most just abrasive and annoying. The small message boards and communities were amazing though.
Its not specifically hard but its also not just as easy to use. I say this as someone whos been gaming on linux for over a decade now. You still run into issues here and there with proton(often a devs fault for bad code) and there is genuinely a lot more going on and tweakable on the steamdeck.
Steamdeck is a great device but Nintendo is good at making simple systems