If you require Steam, my guess is that that should drive your choice. It is likely a differentiator. Consider installation, official support, community support. That usually means choose a distro many other Steam users use.
Agreed. Ease of support for Steam installation varies widely, from a single apt-get command to fairly rotund wiki pages and even a reddit flamewar. It's a very good initial filter, and it's why raw Debian is out of contention.
My impression is that Steam work is done by the publisher only for the most "important" distros. I assume that is Ubuntu.
That's indeed the one the vendor supports. However, other distros that care about Steam appear to have become adept at faking enough of the supported environment to allow a seamless install.
If you want proprietary video drivers, my guess is that the same applies: choose Ubuntu.
I bought an AMD card specifically so not to have this issue.
If you want a simple life, pick a popular distro that wants to give you a simple life. One that has the same view of simplicity that you do. (KDE isn't simple.)
For me, simplicity *is* KDE because I've used it for more than a dozen years. By contrast, it would be the other desktops that would require a learning process. YMMV.
You probably want smooth upgrades or long version life. Ubuntu LTS provides both.
Non-fanboy reviews of 22.04 have been unkind. Chromium is now only available as a snap, and apparently the install system doesn't even inform you that it's downloading a snap instead of a dpkg. This is not a parade in which I want to march, much as I was previously a long time Kubuntu user.
Fedora is unfriendly to proprietary things. I like that but you probably don't. Steam may well be one of those proprietary things. I have no idea if your AMD video card runs better with a proprietary driver.
It's not that I wanna be friendly, it's that I need to work with it to get to a desired destination (play my game) and Steam is the gatekeeper.
I'm delighted to use FOSS wherever possible, and as I said before I specifically chose hardware to avoid proprietary drivers.
I don't like Snaps or Flatpaks for the same reasons DCB doesn't like them. But they might just be what you need to install the latest versions of Firefox or Chrome or Chromium on an older version of a distro.
Thankfully my use cases don't match these at all.
Still looking here if anyone has experience with MX, which remains my top contender.
- Evan