I'm too lazy to do the research, but I have a few tentative observations. 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.
My impression is that Steam work is done by the publisher only for the most "important" distros. I assume that is Ubuntu. If you want proprietary video drivers, my guess is that the same applies: choose Ubuntu. 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.) You probably want smooth upgrades or long version life. Ubuntu LTS provides both. I'm not an expert, but I think debian provides long version life but not so smooth version upgrades. Fedora (my usual choice) provides pretty good version upgrades but relatively short support lifetime (roughly two six-month releases, and a few months grace period). If you choose Fedora, staying one release back seems to reduce the fire-hose of updates. 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. 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. I don't think that it is safe to run old versions of those browsers. The same considerations might apply to things like LibreOffice. Old distros might not run on the newest hardware. PC makers often come up with new stuff that demands new drivers. Random example: a few months ago, my son bought a motherboard that had a 2.5 gigabit ethernet port; no distro image supported it; Fedora only supported it after kernel updates were applied (they had already been released). --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
