You can turn off shader precompilation in Steam, but that’s not tied to the distro.
If you have it off, you won’t need to have the pass run before starting a game, but then the problem that it was aimed at solving comes up – shader compilation has to happen during gameplay, and this can cause momentary hiccups when a shader is used for the first time.
Steam can optionally do background shader compilation, in which case it’ll run at some point after updating a game, rather than right before a game runs. That may or may not be what one wants.