Steam Deck

Desktop mode on the Steam Deck is using KDE Plasma. You can use that on the vast majority of Linux distros.

Here is a few the spring to mind:

• Bazzite - A good place to start, their project goal is to basically be SteamOS like experience you can put on any machine.
• Fedora Workstation with KDE - Bazzite is based off of this project, it's a more general experiance, lots of people enjoy it.
• Kubuntu - Ubuntu is very popular distro, this is their KDE version.
• OpenSuse Tumbleweed - For folks who want the most up to date software possible.

A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.

I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.

The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).

How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.

Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.

Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.

I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.

Bazzite, I guess.

Welcome to the world of Linux. Check out Fedora Kinoite. Here's how they're similar:

✅ It's immutable -- core OS files are read only. Just like the SteamDeck, this is more stable and secure. Updates happen all at once and the entire system can be rolled back to a working configuration ("snapshot") if it all goes south.

✅ Applications are containerized and installed via a software store. Flatpak via Flathub is my personal preference, here.

✅ It uses the KDE Plasma desktop environment. In Linux there are a handful of DEs to choose from. The SD uses KDE and so does Kinoite. This is probably where you'll see most similarities (that Windows '95 feel).

✅ Fedora's community, like the SD, is large. Got a problem? There's probably someone on the forums who had the same issue and can provide a solution.

I've been running it exclusively for two years now. As a self proclaimed distro-hopper, that's really remarkable.

https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/

Since desktop mode is basically just KDE but without the ability to install software packages you could try Fedora.

They do a version just like desktop mode that has you install everything through the store, or you can get the regular variety to get a bit more flexibility.

Personally I'd steer clear of anything special as your first Linux install. Go with standard Fedora, then you can experiment and branch out if you're interested, but you don't have to if you like what you've got.

Adobe and Linux isn't a thing unfortunately

If you want to get started with Linux, I'd recommended Mint. It's very easy to install and will run on just about anything. The Cinnamon desktop is pretty similar to Windows and you'll feel right at home. Install Steam and start playing your games, it's that simple. There are of course plenty of other excellent options but for ease of getting started, I don't think anything beats Mint.

I vouch for Kubuntu. It uses KDE Plasma, which is the exact same UI as SreamOS desktop mode. It's based on Ubuntu, which is a very popular distro, so there's a lot of support and apps that are packaged for it

The closest thing to SteamOS is ChimeraOS. Though it sounds like you're mostly referring to Plasma, which is the desktop environment (DE) AKA the graphical user interface (GUI), and can be installed with just about any distro. ChimeraOS looks like it only comes with GNOME, which I personally prefer anyway.

It is very friendly until you need to do something other than very basic things, at which point you'd better be prepared to become very familiar with the terminal.

Bazzite is the new hotness though, and it's what I use, because it comes with a variety of customizations out of the box, and the ujust commands can greatly simplify a lot of common tasks that are otherwise far more complicated. Only downside of that is that it mostly only supports flatpaks and appimages, .deb and .rpm are the most common package formats and those have to be installed in containers, which comes with all the fun complications of containerization and sandboxing.

You might give GNOME a try though if you want to play around with something different. I much prefer it from an aesthetic perspective. Plasma is essentially made to look like Windows and GNOME more resembles MacOS.

Be aware that when using these distros that some games will recognize your device as a Steam Deck and apply some fucked up graphics tweaks that severely limit performance. You can undo them with a simple launch argument but it's super frustrating until you figure that out. Protondb is your friend there.

For some reason CachyOS hasn't been mentioned. Like others said basically any distro can do what you're describing, and this one is also one of those "with gaming in mind" distros. Didn't mean you can't do anything else on them, but anything making should "just work". They also have a dedicated image/installer for "handheld" PCs like the steam deck that come preconfigured for that interface combination (but don't use this special image on a normal PC/desktop).

Like SteamOS, it's based on Arch, but unlike SteamOS or Bazzite it isn't immutable. That's a matter of preference. Being a rolling release means frequent and direct updates of new releases of any kind (kernel, software, everything, ...). KDE is the default install option, like on the steam deck, but of course basically all other options are also available is you want (additionally or instead of kde).

Alright, y'all, I really appreciate all the feedback, I believe I understand the gist of most of it. Bazzite is sounding really nice, I just have one big concern: Can I put Adobe on it, so I can dropkick Windows out of my life? I did find this.

I used to work with a guy who would wear what liked like a band touring tee shirt, but the "band" was "Grants March to the Sea" and the locations were every town he razed to the ground.

Nobara