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Like, why Valve? I was so close to clearing out all the games I was partway through, now I need to add some demos to my backlog (not many, this Next Fest is kinda weak).
Probably could've made it but I haven't picked a distro. I'm planning on turning my desktop into a dedicated gaming computer and not daily driver, because of the malware risk. I wanted something not finicky, something devs would test on as a known quantity, and preferably something Arch-based like SteamOS.
- Garuda (Arch-based)
- Bazzite (Known quantity, immutable, Fedora-based, I don't trust it for some reason)
- Nobara (Proton-adjacent distro, Fedora-based)
- CachyOS (Super fast, Arch-based, presumably finicky?)
- Windows 7 (Based, unsupported by steam, insecure)
I used Garuda, and garuda is cool, seriously the first time user experience is fancy, but it's also a lot and if you need more than basic support you're probably going to be headed over to the Arch community who is going to treat you different because you're not really fully on Arch. You're also definitely going to forcibly learn a lot picking anything arch based as your first Linux distro.
Skipping ahead, of the choices you've listed and for someone new to Linux who just wants an OS to use I'd go for Bazzite.