You’ve had quite some suggestions already… but I’m going to throw another one in which I don’t think I’ve seen yet: openSUSE.
What I personally like is that you can get a lot of settings done through their GUI settings tool YaST. It is RPM based by the way, like Fedora (which you already listed).
You can go for a more traditional option with about a yearly release cycle called Leap (which is based on SUSE Enterprise). Or for a rolling release called Tumbleweed.
If you’re on the more conservative side of updating, then Leap is comparable with Mint and Ubuntu; takes a while for updates to trickle down to them, but they’re quite stable releases. Or if you don’t mind a rolling one (like Arch for instance), go for Tumbleweed.
I personally run both on different systems. With my main desktop running Tumbleweed and that’s where I mostly play games on.
@Aug
I was looking at openSUSE, i have used it a lot in production setups. Just never as a workstation. I might look into and see what it can offer in terms of tumbleweed. i know a college of mine at work uses it at home for all of his gaming and work. I’m gonna talk with him and hear how it goes for him on this front. Thanks for the recommendation, i had totally forget about openSUSE.
@LightKind
Might be worth a try. i have seen it alot when it comes to emulation and gaming machines. i will do some research on it and see where it takes me.
Mint does seem like a simple OS. My boss is running it because of a surface tablet. But to be fair, he never really ran linux of any sort before. Also the camera on his surface table when using mint works. Which is a surprise to me.
I have ran debian SID for a while when i needed newer packages for my workstation. Production has always stayed with Debian normal. Less of a pain to bugfix and fix whatever will break.
I will at some point give Arch a go just to learn the process.
Bazzite is appropriate for any kind of machine including Desktops and Laptops. It just also comes, in some flavours, with the Steam Deck UI as well. Definitely worth a try imo. It’s one of the best OSes I’ve ever used, if not the best one.
I will be trying it on my ASUS Ally here today and see how it goes.
The windows installation on it halfway broken, might as well try the other solution out on it.