For me it's the exact opposite, I had problems with Steam games on Wayland and I switched back to X11.

You probably used Nvidia and some outdated distro with a bad DE on top. Not something you should be using. Using X11 is DOA anyway, so you can figure out what was wrong in your case and use better options.

No, AMD. I had issues on the latest Debian, released this summer, with KDE. X11 works perfectly fine. I would be happy with wayland too, if it worked. And in fact I use it on my other device.

What kind of issues though with what GPU? I'm using Debian testing, it all works fine with AMD and KDE Plasma Wayland session.

With AMD, always make sure to use latest kernel, Mesa and amdgpu firmware.

The Steam main window did not open, although Steam itself did load in the background. I could work around this by disabling smooth scrolling on web view and some other GPU-related option (I forgot exactly).

But then there was a strange glitch on every single game (both native and Proton-based). Periodically (e.g. every ~10 seconds on some 3D games, on every screen reload on some other) the screen turned black for about 2 seconds.

Then I remembered that I had some issue when I first installed Debian 12 two years, though I forgot which issues exactly, and that I solved them by switching from Wayland to X11.

What DE? And that's with all the latest components as above? I wouldn't use Debian stable for gaming purposes, since it falls behind very quickly. Debian testing / unstable is a better idea, and even then you'd want to install latest amdgpu firmware manually potentially.

KDE, not sure what version the kernel and the drivers are, whatever Debian stable has. I think kernel is 6.12.

I'll try updating the firmware and drivers manually if I have more issues in the future, thanks.

Yeah, for sure always have latest kernel, Mesa and firmware if you are having any gaming issues. 6.12 is already old by now.

Any examples of “something with recent kde”? I have Ubuntu currently, wanted to switch to the Mint, now want to hear more opinions

I use mint's cinnamon UI on Ubuntu. It's by far my favorite desktop, but yeah Mint's main packages are too far out of date usually.

Fedora

How do you deal with the short lifespan until EOL? I've been using Rocky (and CentOS before that) simply to avoid dealing with EOL so often.

Fedora makes major upgrades pretty easy - you can even do it via the GUI Software Center, then reboot.

Personally I'm using Kinoite[1], an "immutable" version of Fedora that has an immutable base image, which makes it nearly impossible to break things during updates (even major upgrades).

[1] - https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/

I'd say any rolling distro. Try Debian testing or unstable if you prefer Debian distros family (choose KDE during installation). Or try Arch.

KDE also started making its own Arch based distro now: https://kde.org/linux/

But it's one of those immutable flavors. I prefer something more flexible.