Opensuse Tumbleweed. You get the drivers, it's stable, and the one time it isn't you just roll back to the prior snapshot in the boot menu that it takes automatically. Steam runs great on it. Honestly about the best there is.

https://wiki.pika-os.com/en/home

this should tick all your boxes.

PikaOS is Debian with the latest drivers and hardware and selective updates where needed. It's basically perfect for me and I've been daily driving it on 3 different PCs (2 Nvidia 1 AMD) for more than a year now with zero regrets or significant issues. I did pop into the discord with a few speed bumps and questions that were quickly answered.

If you want to keep up with newer hardware and software and get the best performance out of your games, you'll want to use a distro with faster updates.

I've been using Nobara on my gaming computer for about 2 years and it's been pretty good, I get great performance in all my games.

Are you a huge fan of Debian as a base? And what Desktop environment/window manager do you prefer?

I am not a Linux person except for proxmox box, but I saw this on lemmy yesterday, and it talks about nvidia drivers on Debian 13

https://teejeetech.com/2025/08/14/debian_13_tips/

The things I've been reading for years about Debian make me think most "linux" people really don't know or understand what stable/unstable means.

I ran mint (non debian) on older hardware for years and loved it mostly.

Upgraded everything in march and realised i needed newer kernel newer mesa. I could of installed from certain ppa's but hey 12-13 years on one distro i fancied a change.

Kde took some learning (does one need all those settings) but hey functional hardware is the goal and the goal was met. Like graphics tablet i had to mess with modprobe and .sh files just works magnificently.

I can't compare performance as 8 thread to 24 thread i do not see a fair comparison.

Leaving the comfort zone i think made me understand more about linux and that is very good.

Ubuntu-based, Arch-based, Fedora-based distributions will do you fine.

Debian is great for having a rock solid stable system that works, but not for the latest and greatest software or hardware combis.

I knew which video you were talking about before I even clicked the link.

Don't use Debian for a gaming PC. Period.

Stick with an Ubuntu derivative like Mint or Kubuntu. It's your best bet.

If you want a gaming exclusive platform, you might want to check out Bazzite as well. But the *buntus are best IMO.

First of all, no, youre not a noob, the corrent Name for people who contradict their own statements in less than 2 minutes of reading their Text (first you say you run Debian, them you say you are running Mint, which are completely different distros), is A stupid dummy dummy dumb dumb. (Seriously, .ml mods, you either let me say the R word, or you insta block such braindead clumps of biomass)

Second, LMDE still has newer packaged than vanilla Debian, afaik

Third, did you not take a single look at debians Home page, before installing something you yourself call Debian? It literally States that it is a „Stable OS”.

Fourth, if you dont want to overwork your single braincell, just use flatpaks. They already have their own drivers in their Sandbox, so you should be fine.