Okay - I should have been more specific. Can I run regular KDE or gnome apps (a such as gimp), or perhaps something like VSCode on it?

I thought that it only ran the steam app as opposed to a real desktop?

(pardon my ignorance here - I’m vaguely aware of SteamOS, but never tried it)

from Wikipedia:

> for example, there is no file manager or image viewer installed by default. Users can, however, access the GNOME desktop environment and perform tasks such as installing other software

It's "just" Debian with some default configuration and extras (and version 3 will replace Debian with Arch)