>SteamOS is meant to be a gaming specific OS first. It has a desktop environment but none of that loads unless you switch to desktop mode.
I think it's fair for some of us to consider the resource usage of a core feature and not really accept "just don't use desktop mode" as a viable suggestion. Especially if half the pitch is "it's a mobile PC." You can't use many of the features it's capable of in gaming mode.
It's not "don't use desktop mode", it's "switch back to gaming mode before playing a game".
On any 16GB machine you're going to want to close your any ram heavy apps like browsers before starting a game. Switching to gaming mode is an easy way to do that.
> You can't use many of the features it's capable of in gaming mode
It is trivial to switch between gaming mode and desktop mode. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here.