This article includes sales estimates for different handhelds from market research firm IDC.
They place total handheld PC sales of the Steam Deck, RoG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, and MSI Claw at almost 6 million units for the past 3 years. It’s estimated that the Steam Deck makes up between 3.7 to 4 million of those sales, more than all the other major handheld PC manufacturers combined.
The only catch there is that installing mods can be tricky depending on the game and method. Steam workshop mods and games with integrated mod support (BG3, DRG, etc) are super easy to install mods for, but the mod installation process for many other games can vary on difficulty.
Hopefully this will all change with with the rise of more official Linux mod loaders like the new Nexus mods app.
Many mods were made way easier with a recent Proton update. Lots of games use DLL overrides to load mods, which required setting launch commands to use through Proton. This is no longer an issue, so any mods that work by doing this will now function perfectly out of the box.
I recently nodded GTA and the mod had specific instructions for Linux, which I was able to simply ignore thanks to this update.
Most games that use the Nexus mod manager can also be nodded manually, but I do agree that having a native launcher is really nice. I’ve already used it with Cyberpunk. Hopefully native Mod Organizer 2 will happen one day!