Linus tried it but had an issue where installing steam wiped his DE. He switched to Manjaro and Luke used Mint.

Not paying attention while installing steam wiped his desktop. TBF though he isn't that used to using Linux as a desktop. Manjaro did go much smoother for him.

Linus tried to make the point that on windows you don't have to pay close attention when doing something minor like installing Steam. Because why should something like that ever even have the potential to remove your desktop environment? (*On a system meant for the common consumer that is not an expert in the domain*)

Yes he didn't pay attention to the warning, but in fairness Linux gives a lot of warnings. Sudo gives a warning when you first use it, and that's clearly used all the time. To you and I who know what "gnome-de" is (or whatever the package name is) the warning is clear. But to someone new to the space, DE is not a commonly used acronym.

I believe so. He might have switched or tried out Manjaro since he had issues with steam on Pop_OS.

that chain of events should never have happened in the first place.

It's not. Linus used Manjaro.

Linus used it for a bit before a bug in the apt repos caused a forced steam install to uninstall his GUI.

Pretty bad timing because the bug was there for just a short while but at least the devs made changes to prevent such a thing from happening to a beginner in the future