Oh man, you're in for a treat there.

PopOS is what you're looking for friend. Debian is a bit too bare and general use-case. Ubuntu is wrong for the exact reasons you laid out.

Pop is built for the end users, with native integrations for flatpak/deb/whathaveyou. It's built on top of Ubuntu with all the ubuntu annoyances removed.

They even have a distro with pre-baked nvidia drivers should you need it.

I tried it and swapped all of mine over

Any reason why I shouldn’t just go with Debian + KDE and install Steam?

No reason to avoid Debian unless you have hardware so very new that it requires the very latest kernel to operate.

If you go with Debian Stable, you can enable Backports for a fairly recent kernel, currently 6.5.10. You could go with Testing or even Unstable if you're addicted to upgrading as often as possible, but chances are you won't need to.

I'm gaming on Debian Stable with Steam in a flatpak. It works great, and is blissfully low maintenance.

At some point, you'll probably run into people claiming that Debian is bad for gaming performance because of "outdated" packages. In most cases, those people don't know what they're talking about. I suggest ignoring them unless they identify a specific performance issue that actually affects you.

Debian is usually very stable, which means drivers and kernel versions will be outdated in comparison with other distros, which can make you lose possible performance. To be fair I wouldn't worry too much about this though since I don't expect the performance to be significantly different, but it's something to take into consideration.

Don't be afraid of trying a different distro, RedHat or Arch based for example, just make / and /home different partitions and you should be able to install over your root without affecting your home so it makes it easier to switch system if you want to.

From your other comments you seem to have a system simmilar to mine. I use mint, and i'm very happy with it, feature rich and ubuntu based, without the features you dislike like snap.

Only real step requirs for gaming has been installing some overclocking and heat management stuff like corecntrl, as well as some 32 bit archetecture stuff to run steam.

If you're interested in using Debian directly, @c10l@lemmy.world put out a great post on this! It worked absolutely flawlessly for me, it goes over getting things like a newer version of Mesa, newer (or alternative) kernels if that is your thing, along with some extra firmware for AMD cards that aren't present in Debian's packaging yet.

Even just regular Debian is fine, and you can easily install the Flatpak version of Steam if all you want is a newer version of Mesa.

debian is good as is, without flat/snap/fart things. If you are used to it then stick with it and you'll be happy and productive in everything you do, backed by a solid maintained os release process.

I doubt you'll miss out on anything from using Debian Linux is Linux but I will shill fedora. Love that distro

The thing with Linux is you shouldn't be afraid of distro hopping. Just try any distro you want for a few days, and if you don't like it, move on to another one. Repeat until you find the distro you like the most. You can grab a new SSD and swap your system partition to try the new distro of you don't want to format your current system partition.

debians probably fine, but +1 for Nobara. been using it for a few months, not a single complaint. they're even switching to KDE by default in nobara 39, which just released a few days ago

I would recommend fedora. It has more recent packages than debian and it's also quite stable and easy to maintain

Nobara personally is just right for me it's kernel and drivers are alway up to date configured asnd patched for gaming. Even if there is bugs with some package for example they ship with patches applied it is just so convenient. I think learning dnf is well worth it and even if there is some debian only app that you want to install there is alwayd distrobox

I've been happiest with arch, then later manjaro since I didn't have to build it but it's still arch.

There's a lot more software for it with access to AUR. Personally I find it works well for me and I've been using arch and arch-based since 2015.

In case it wasn't clear, I use arch btw.

Honestly, I don't think you are going to take that much time to get used to fedora based distros since in my experience the only thing that ended up changing was the name of the package manager and the faster updates.

I would recommend that you use more up to date distros since gaming in Linux has been having fast-paced performance updates and with the new proton stuff which is relatively new and is only to get more patches because valve is investing on it. So picking up fedora might be a good choice since its more up to date and it isn't that different to debian compared to more minimal/advanced distros such as arch and void (but being more advanced as a lot of percs that simpler distros don't have).

I use Debian, KDE and steam and it works fine. My only limitation was the hardware itself , the os stays out of the way and proton does its thing.

I mainly play on the deck nowadays as I can lounge around with it.

It'll probably be fine, although I'd personally pick some rolling-release distro for better performance.

In any case, besides the release model I'm pretty sure a distribution you use doesn't matter that much. Usually every somewhat popular distro has the same few packages you need for games to work (32-bit libs, wine, steam, whatever).

One word for you... NOBARA. ✌️

Pick what you're comfortable with. In the end, you can get anything running in any distro. Linux is Linux. Worst case you may need to enable unstable repos or cherry pick packages from there.

Some of the "gaming" distros do include patches so if you want an out of the box experience it might make sense to pick one of those. But if you know your way around Linux, it stops mattering because your skills on your preferred distro outweighs the convenience of having it all readily available out of the box.

If you use Flatpaks, some include updated mesa/GPU drivers so the Debian base won't even matter all that much as long as the kernel is new enough. Installing a bleeding edge kernel on Debian is usually fine if you have to as the kernel tries its best to never break userspace.

Here's the thing: some distros are aimed at gamers and have some useful gaming stuff in their default setup. But at the end of the day, if you're comfortable installing stuff on your own, you can game on any Linux distro. It frankly doesn't matter.

So, yes, if you want to game on Debian because you can avoid bloat, by all means do it.

If you're going to be gaming a lot, I can vouch that Nobara is indeed really good. Debian is a solid option but it like the other commenter says, it gets packages a bit later than other distros. This can be annoying since you'll have to go out of your way to install the newest drivers or app that you need.

The bigger reason to use Nobara though is that it comes pre-installed with many patches (some kernel patches too) that would be a total pain to do yourself on Debian. You can see a list of patches on the official site and scroll down.

Depending on the games you wanna play it's probably safer to be somewhat closer to the bleeding edge than Debian would allow you to be. Nobara gets recommended so often because you get a good tradeoff between the newest updates and stability. Also KDE is their standard DE. PopOS is good if you wanna stay with apt, but comes with Gnome out of the box.

Debian 12 and flatpak everything. I recently made the switch from Ubuntu and I couldn't be happier.

I haven't tried it, but I suppose you'll do just fine with debian sid. i.e edit /etc/apt/sources.list, swap $distro_nickname for sid, sudo apt update, sudo apt full-upgrade.