Canonical (Kubuntu) and Red Hat (Fedora, I suggest the KDE variant) are very big and old companies if that's what you want.

If you pick one of the core distros like (Fedora/Centos/RHEL/SuSE) or (Debian/Ubuntu) they have been around for decades and will be around for decades more. You don't have to pay attention to whatever trendy new Linux distro of the week has just come up.

Red Hat, Canonical and Novel aren't going anywhere. That's fedora, *buntu and Suse.

Yeah I was the same way. When you express that there’s too many options, and you don’t feel confident in selecting between them, a Linux enthusiast will always answer with a couple of options as if it is the final answer. Then someone always responds to that comment saying why the options are wrong and suggests others. Then someone else comments saying “Just use one of the ones that…” and doesn’t even stick to a specific distro but rather assumes you have the background knowledge to interpret and move forward based on a few key features.

Eventually I just went with Mint and it went pretty well. Maybe I’ll switch, but the first try is the hardest and now I’m over that hurdle. Took years longer than it should have to start because people can’t help but argue in every comment chain.

It’s definitely more attractive to use SteamOS because we know it’s an OS being designed for our general use case by a company that will support it meaningfully (as it already has been with Proton), and will continue to support it for a while. I’m sure a lot of users will switch OSes after a while, and existing Linux users should support the “first step” move to SteamOS knowing this.

It’s probably not the best possible OS choice, but considering no one can agree that any option is the best choice, that doesn’t really factor into the decision.

SteamOS is already not the best gaming distro. Besides I never said it would be bad, I just said it's silly to be sticking with Windows 11 because you're waiting for SteamOS, and people have been saying this for years still waiting and waiting. It's less silly now that we might actually be closer to the release date.

What are you talking about, if ease of updates is a concern then it literally does not get better than bazzite. You don't even notice that updates are happening, that's how easy they are

I don’t know if them releasing it for a bigger audience necessarily means they’ll support it. Might very well be that they’ll rely on the community for that.