In my own experience, the hardware support that breaks is the GPU. For me, the GPU has broken occasionally (once every couple years) regardless of distribution,

In my own experience, the hardware support that breaks is the GPU. For me, the GPU has broken occasionally (once every couple years) regardless of distribution, unless I'm using an Intel GPU or an older GPU with mainline support. I'm sure that Valve is going to install a much smaller set of core software than a typical desktop, though.