Not exactly a Steam OS expert, but based on my own observations:
Switching to desktop is indeed fast
Given you see the intro movie etc, you fully reboot when ‘returning’ to gaming mode. You get the boot movie too.
Speculation from my side: Gaming mode needs to be booted directly into, with desktop mode (a regular-ish Linux environment) existing ‘under’ the gaming mode UI. So switching to desktop mode shuts down gaming mode, whereas to get back into it you need to reboot.
Return to gaming mode also causes that weird bug right now where green lines start spreading from the right of the device to the left, it happened to me.once so I just reboot my device when in desktop mode to get back into gaming mode.
That said, doing an actual reboot does seem to take even LONGER than going back to gaming mode normally, but that may be my imagination
Not exactly a Steam OS expert, but based on my own observations:
Return to gaming mode also causes that weird bug right now where green lines start spreading from the right of the device to the left, it happened to me.once so I just reboot my device when in desktop mode to get back into gaming mode.
That said, doing an actual reboot does seem to take even LONGER than going back to gaming mode normally, but that may be my imagination