Bazzite

Bazzite is the one to pick if the computer is mainly for games. It is built on Fedora's atomic desktops, which means the system arrives as one tested image rather than thousands of separate pieces. Steam, the graphics drivers and controller support are already set up when you first log in.

The safety net is the good part. Each update is a new image, the previous one stays on the disk, and if something goes wrong you choose the older one from the boot menu and you are back where you were. Images stay available for 90 days.

The catch is that this is not a normal Linux system to live with. Extra software installs as self contained app packages rather than into the system, so older how-to guides written for Ubuntu often do not apply. Competitive games with anti-cheat that runs deep in the system, such as several popular shooters, will still refuse to start. Bazzite asks for a 2 GHz quad core processor, 8 GB of memory and 64 GB free on an internal solid state drive, with roughly 120 GB recommended.