I use KDE Neon on my laptop and I’d prefer to have KDE as a DE on this one too (if possible) but I don’t mind a non Ubuntu base. Basically I’d just like to be able to play games on it without much hassle but I know how to paste commands into the terminal if the need arises.
I would just toss in my experience w Bazzite as a warning - I don’t recommend, unless you’re already a fedora devotee or really cool with how an atomic distro works. The ‘it just works’ was exactly NOT what I experienced - had to constantly manually set Xwindow compatibility with Flatseal (apps just … wouldn’t open… no explanation! Yay! The wayland is buggy? Took a few threads on Bazzites official discord to figure that out). It wouldn’t mount secondary drives… would take a fuckton of work to get them recognized, mounted, and then it would ‘forget’ them again! Discord NEVER functioned properly (no streaming, even on Canary fork, etc. etc. etc.) It come’s with things ‘preinstalled’ and if those are exactly what you need its probably fine, but its a handheld/steamOS facing project… I don’t see any reason to recommend it here. For me (prefer GNOME environment, despite limitations), I’ve settled on a slightly tweaked version of Pop!_OS and s76’s cosmic environment… but y’know, as others mention, this will run most popular stuff. I always love to go w a Debian fork for stability and familiarity. YMMV. Good luck!
Thanks for the warning. I am currently running Fedora (because “it just works”) and I’m drowning in bugs and incompatibilities.
I was considering Bazzite because of all the recommendations, but considering my luck (and probably my hardware combination) I’d probably end up just like you described.
Could try Nobara, too.
its Fedora based, as well… and I am a blithering idiot and had almost no issues with it.