Thanks!

Shameless self promotion: https://lemm.ee/post/37682729

It won’t answer all of your answers, but it should at least give you a good primer on what distros are and what are the main key takeaways.

Seconded. I recently moved my gaming rig from Nobara to Bazzite because this machine is only occasionally booted, and I don’t want to spend the little time I have available for gaming doing maintenance instead. Except from a mounting error for my secondary drive that I made (bc after 20+ years on Linux I still can’t be arsed enough to learn how to fstab), I was in Cyberpunk 2077 in less than 5 minutes.

Pros:

• Easy setup, everything works out of the box
• A lot of preinstalled gaming-related packages and tweaks, plus a lot of QOL improvements over Silverblue/Kinoite
• Ready to game as soon as it’s installed
• No updates, no maintenance! Full system images are downloaded and installed in the background and are applied at reboot.
• Immutable so “impossible” to fuck up.
• uBlue projects are not distros but a delivery system, all the work is actually done by Fedora. No risk associated with a single-maintainer project like Nobara.

Cons:

• Immutable so “impossible” to fuck up.

Pro tip: don’t keep your Steam games on a Windows partition. They won’t launch.