If you want a more curated experience that takes a lot of the rough edges off Linux: https://bazzite.gg

Bazzite isn't going to be as flexible as some other distros, but it's goal is to make the Linux transition as easy as possible. It's aimed primarily at gamers but you'll get a full OS that you can do all the normal stuff on

You can't perform all the usual tasks with it; it's a limited, immutable Arch derivative.

you might be thinking of the new KDE distro. bazzite is fedora silverblue based. iirc there's access to flatpak homebrew, as well as rpm-ostree (basically rpm) among others

You are right :)

For regular people that just want gaming and a web browser it's fine. It would drive people like us nuts, but they aren't gonna care.

It can load into a desktop environment by default and you can install Flatpacks, and it comes setup for gaming out of the box. That's enough for 90% of people.

Debian works fine with Proton for me. I think it is not very picky.

SteamOS is arch based so some variant of that makes a lot of sense if you're not going for steamos directly

I just run Debian Trixie with almost no problems. I build the kernels I use off the upstream release cycle (so, 6.17-rc6 right now). I build with LLVM Full LTO, not because it's necessarily faster, but because I want to find bugs in it :)

For some reason the video acceleration in Steam itself will break running games if you alt-tab back and forth. But it can be disabled in the menus, and I haven't missed it at all.

Kubuntu works fine for me. Got cyberpunk to run on it very well, i havent had a game not work so far, but i don't play online shooters.

Kubuntu is Debian but i don't think that has caused any issues.

Since i got the deck i don't really use the PC for gaming much though.

This is all purely my anecdotal opinion.