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.

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.

I would recommend Nobara, Bazzite or PopOS for gaming; My personal experience with Debian is that it's a great OS, but the focus lies less on cutting edge features or support of the latest hardware, and more on stability over everything else, and the desktop environment is more of an convenience feature - Debian is very happy as a headless server. If you want an OS with record setting uptimes, pick Debian; but for gaming you want to be on the cutting edge, and that's simply not the case with Debian.

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.

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/

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.