The UK is significantly influenced by Russia. Brexit is a prime, recent example, as well as the frequent donations from oligarchs to the Conservative party
Close but I'd say it's more like a handheld console with a Chromebook attached.
Steam Deck apps (mostly) have to come from a Flatpak repo to install correctly but Flathub (the default repo and therefore defacto app store on the Steam Deck) has lots of the common apps for daily use, even if they are largely unofficial/unsupported versions. So for 95% of people, it's definitely usable as a laptop/desktop replacement, but if you want to develop or want stuff outside the Flatpak repos, it's a bit of a hassle.
I'm just your average full stack JS dev and I'm not doing any interesting project in my free time besides personal website stuff. Fortunately this means I can do literally everything on the Steam Deck (besides hosting obviously[1]).
What kind of development do you do? In theory, it's possible for a lot of roles. If you can get your environment working smoothly on a distro that Distrobox supports then you should be able to work on it.
I'd love to see someone rock up to the office with a Steam Deck, plug it in, and just start working. That's quite the image.
[1] The Steam Deck has a kind of A/B boot. By default it loads into Gaming mode and the other is Desktop mode. In Gaming mode, most apps and services aren't running (as far as I can tell but now I want to check) so I don't think you could ensure a server stays running in the background if you switched back to Gaming mode. On the other hand, you could live totally in Desktop mode and game from there, only losing the nice Gaming mode GUI.
I'm really enjoying Distrobox. With it, I've been able to develop on my Steam Deck and use it as my primary and only device.
The Steam Deck default OS (Steam OS 3) is a heavily locked down variant of Arch with only a couple of writable directories. With Distrobox, I can run an Ubuntu environment from one of those directories, ensuring that when I install SDKs or tools, they're being installed to a writable area of the OS but require no config to change what they think is intended install location.