not at all! SteamOS and Bazzite are pretty fundamentally different on the back end (one is arch, one is fedora) but on the front end, they both launch into steam big picture mode, and offer a KDE desktop you can switch to.

steamOS is available for download as a beta, but it is still a very handheld focused distro and does not include simple QOL things like print drivers, it struggles with things like wake from sleep, but it’s fairly stable and pretty usable

bazzite is a little more refined and a little more fully fleshed out, it includes more packages and drivers and is better suited as a ‘daily driver’ os

both are immutable distros, meaning you can’t really install stuff outside of the official app store/repository and a lot of terminal commands wont work out of the box. this means there are ‘nannies’ to make sure you don’t effectively softlock your os by running random terminal commands that chatbot told you were a good idea while troubleshooting.

the primary focus of these distros is gaming, so they are optimized for speed, performance, and compatibility with steam/lutris, and putting up safety rails to make sure you dont nuke yourself.

distros like cachyOS and nobara have the same focus, but do not have the nannies, so you can sudo whatever you want (but remember, #3 with great power comes great responsibility). its gaming focused, but meant for more confident power users.

in terms of what to install it on… linux loves team red, and redder the better! everything AMD is always going to work best, an intel cpu is going to work as poorly (hot and slow) on linux as it does on windows, but amd GPU is always preferred for any linux builds. ive never had a microsoft surface to mess around with, but youtube suggests there are lots of options for installing linux on a surface (although i dont know what hoops you have to jump trough… but if youre interested in linux, then jumping through hoops should be second nature to you lol)