I've had a slowish laptop (intel gpu) with Manjaro (Arch derivative) and Steam for a few years now. It's not my main laptop but I fire it up once or twice a wee

I've had a slowish laptop (intel gpu) with Manjaro (Arch derivative) and Steam for a few years now. It's not my main laptop but I fire it up once or twice a week for some light gaming (I have some indie games that I like). It works great for that despite Intel performance not being great, obviously. Every few weeks I use the Manjaro settings tool to update the kernel to the latest and greatest. And of course I update packages regularly with a command line tool called yay. I can't say it has been completely without issues. But so far I've been able to solve these issues. And this doesn't happen a lot. But probably not a great distribution for beginners as you are expected to solve problems on the command line. But if you know what you are doing, this is pretty nice and stable. I like having rolling updates and not missing out on all the latest stuff. Having Steam means that Windows is now optional for gaming. You don't need it for most games. They'll work fine on Linux. There are exceptions of course but mostly everything I have just works fine. And between Mac and Linux, I just have no patience for the dreary experience that is Windows. Most other work stuff you can get via snap/flatpak (I use both). IMHO both need work but software availability is pretty good. But for things I care about, I tend to install them manually anyway so I don't have any middlemen to deal with between me and the software project. E.g. Firefox can update itself if you just install the tar ball from them. Works great. With most linux distributions, the main differentiators seem to be the amount of effort they do to have users needing to use a terminal window with various degrees of success. With most Linux distributions, you'll find yourself needing a terminal window sooner or later.