DuckDuckGO for the bangs, with a custom !bang made for my favorite SearXNG instance; on which most of my ‘googling’ actually happens.

You should be fine regardless. However, I have at least read from one developer that works on one of the SteamOS clones that there is still some merit in running it on Arch due to how Valve targets that specifically for its SteamOS. One might even get better performances on Arch as the user is able to tweak it beyond what SteamOS offers. But this requires proper know-how, so this route is not recommended for those that are still very novel to Linux.

has anyone here used this who can comment on it?

I’ve been on uBlue since a couple of months. Initially, I just rebased to their silverblue-main image because it offered a more sane image to build upon as all of their images have already applied every relevant step everyone does to their ‘Silverblue-systems’ anyways; codecs, enabling hardware-acceleration, support for nvidia + secureboot when applicable etc. But recently I’ve started building my ‘own’ image using their toolkit and it has been a blast. I’m a huge fan of what NixOS and Guix do in the space of declarative distros. However, unfortunately, I had my reasons to not go down that route. The toolkit offered by uBlue enables me to have (pretty much) a declarative system on a more traditional -albeit ‘immutable’- distro. If one desires reproducibility, atomic updates, very high security-standards and a pinch of declarativity to eliminate bitrot, configuration drift, unknown states etc; then one simply can’t ignore uBlue’s offerings as one of if not the best solution out there.

i see a lot of recommendations for nobara, but this seems to do a similar thing in a more convenient and reversible way

Nobara is great and does indeed have similar design goals; namely improving the stock experience. To put it bluntly; Nobara is to Fedora Workstation what uBlue (thus including Bazzite) is to Fedora Silverblue. To be clear; uBlue offers a fleet of different (base-)images; thus enabling everyone to use their favorite desktop environment on their ‘Immutable’ Desktop; even those beyond GNOME, KDE and Sway that Fedora itself supports on their ‘Immutable Desktops’. So in that sense -perhaps paradoxically- Nobara is more rigid on install than uBlue, while the latter is the one referred to as ‘immutable’. It’s perhaps important to note that uBlue is not a distro; at least not in the traditional sense:

“This isn’t a distribution, you can always rebase back to Fedora without reinstalling. This is a unique relationship between an upstream and downstream that is popular in cloud, but still new to the Linux desktop. “Custom images” seems to be a decent place to start since that’s what people call them in cloud.”