FWIW, I experience similar behavior sometimes (hard graphics freeze with a game) but like what tal@ says, the underlying system is still running. If you make sure sshd is configured and you have an account on the laptop with your key, you can most of the time get into the running system and restart gdm/lightdm which will kill your DE session, reset the GPU, and get you back into the DE. Given you mention a laptop: what I’ve seen that exacerbates this issue is when the laptop has a integrated and discrete GPU and you’re driving an external display. For my gaming laptop, it has an RTX2060 in it and the HDMI port is driven from the dGPU, but rendering is negotiated with the iGPU. What helps is disabling the external monitor and/or disabling the iGPU in the UEFI settings. I even experience issues in Windows with this: stutters if iGPU and dGPU enabled and driving the external display.
This is my hope, too, but realistically what is going to happen is that it will only work well, out of the box for their own gear. I like the idea of getting a frame and machine (even if it is a bit underpowered), wireless foveated streaming means longer battery life and if it just works, that would be amazing. Lots of people complaining the machine will be underpowered, but they aren’t counting that Valve has been using this as a target platform. Lots of shit will just work out of the box because that will give the best experience. Probably trying to get the wireless link on your own linux setup won’t work without lots of futzing. Valve is free to put in whatever hacks they need to make it go. I’m willing to pay money for that so I’m not wasting my Claude tokens and my time trying to make it go