PopOS is in a rough state. The stable ISO is using absurdly an absurdly outdated desktop, and the beta using COSMIC desktop. I personally love COSMIC, but it is far from stable, so I would not recommend it to most users.

CachyOS is a great distro. The performance gains from its changes won't be huge, but the people acting like its nonexistent are silly. They also make many upcoming performance improving features like NTSYNC available early in their default kernel.

I definitely wouldn't go Debian or Mint for gaming personally. I don't like stable distros with such slow release schedules for gaming, mainly because of stuff like the prior mentioned NTSYNC. You don't get those new features for a long time.

I saw people recommending Bazzite, which is a distros I highly recommend. The only issue I have with Bazzite is that installing kernel modules they don't ship is pretty much unsupported and requires a lot of jumping through hoops. Most people won't need this, but it matters from some use cases like if you need steering wheel drivers.

I had been rocking CachyOS for a year or so but the recent Nvidia drivers or something caused me a shit load on instability so I'm back on windows for now. Got tired of tinkering. 😅

I use cachyos for gaming and work. It's amazing. Stable, fast, drivers all work with no extra setup. Just select Ext4 during installation if you want the fastest hard drive performance.

Have you checked out OpenSUSE Tumbleweed? Very stable rolling release. I've been using it for a couple years without issues.

While I like tinkering, I do want it to be relatively stable, not suprising me with issues when I need it.

I would suggest avoidig pure rolling distros then. Also bear in mind that usually the performance difference between distros is not really big enough to make a difference for most things.

I would consider something like Mint. But what I did on my new laptop was that I installed PopOS 24.04 Alpha and used gnome-session ("sudo apt install gnome-session") on it, though I've switched over to COSMIC now as I'm writing apps for it and it works for my games. It'll get regular kernel+mesa updates but the base os will remain "LTS stable".

You could also go the Fedora (KDE or GNOME spins) route, it has a regular update schedule, this might be a great option for you.

There's an atomic Fedora spin made for gaming, Bazzite, and the experience has been to install, and just go. Everything works, everything is set up for gaming and performance monitoring, it's actually baffling how good this is!

I realise I' sounding like a shill, but genuinely it's great and seems to be what you're looking for. You can always just try it in a VM!

Fedora. It just works. I use it for work and it doesn't let me down. Semi annual upgrading it is easy and it seems to be moving slowly, because gnome/LibreOffice is, to flatpaks. It's slow to change and stable because of it, they still include Grub when it became a relic since systemd included gummyboot (systemd-boot) many years ago.

Contrast that with ArchLinux which is 'cleaner' and a rolling distro which I prefer; Fedora isn't. I use it for a Rescue USB. I used to use it for work but, and this is long ago, I managed to break it quite easily by 'fixing it' too much! ArchLinux doesn't let me down but I don't have a gui or Window manager on it, console only, and I know my way around Linux reasonably well.

Debian is still confused about systemd. Run a combination of testing and unstable branches on the desktop and you've got a great system but this is before the systemd days where they moved all the systemd defaults to the old/odd places that make no sense. As you say, snap appears to be another mad experiment by Ubuntu, like mir when everyone went to wayland.

If you're going to use your PC for games, I think there may be better distros than these. I'm not a gamer so I can't advise.

I'm not a huge fan of derivative distros, like Ubuntu (based on Debian decreasingly) or so on. I'm not one to mess about with screen savers etc and aesthetics though. To me derivatives add bloat and unexpected changes.

Source distros are a rabbit hole I've been down. They were fun but I couldn't get myself to do any work when I had them.

I've never tried SUSE, it's alternative rpm style distro which can be stable as a rolling.

Distrowatch.com is always worth a visit. Find a/several forum that is your intended use and find out which district they use there; if you have issues they'll know how to fix it.

You want stable and no snaps.

Debian

I see people saying CachyOS is finicky, but I've had almost no issues in two years of extensive use.

And anything that pops up gets fixed extremely quickly.

What’s better, everything you need for gaming is in the repos by default and pre-tweaked, no need to fuss with it like other distros. This is my nitpick with Fedora or Arch AUR: once you go outside the curated, officially supported packages, you are asking for trouble.

Have you looked at tumbleweed? Its a rolling release so its always up to date but opensuse's testing is fantastic. It's very stable and on the off chance there's a regression that impacts usability, it has built in version snapshots. It takes literally 45 seconds to roll back to a previous working version.

I'm quite happy with CachyOS but use whatever makes you happy. Just pick something with a desktop envionment you like (KDE, Cinnamon, MATE, GNOME)

If you want CachyOS I highly recommend you to have atleast Haswell or Alteast Ryzen If you use AMD due to their Compiled packages and stuff.

Endeavor os If you don't have atleast haswell/Ryzen.

Stock Arch If your fine building it.

Debian I wouldn't recommend to use for a pc you use often.

Popos I never used it before but it seems like a "stable gaming" Distro.

Mint is also a great option I use it on pcs I sometimes use and it's also easy to use.

Cachy - you might have some extra hoops to jump through. The performance difference is negligible for just desktop usage.

PopOS - no real benefit unless you're running Nvidia, and then it's only for the moderately useful graphics switching stuff.

You sound like you want Fedora for simplicity's sake, honestly. There's really no other major performance differences between desktop distros. Any tunings that one has you can just apply to another if you know their benefits.