That's what I've done with my deck. Some things just aren't available through discover, and the Firefox build on there has behavior that I don't like or know how to correct. Distrobox gives me access to the Arch repos + AUR with persistence that you can't get on SteamOS without it.
Installing software on Linux almost never involves "copying and running random bits of code" unless you have a need for some really obscure program. Learn how to use your distribution's package manager.