Nah you're overthinking it. Grab a beginner friendly distro like Mint and just start using it. All this is fanboy talk that can be interesting but doesn't affect 99% of users.

Valve’s use-case for choosing a gnu+linux distro is likely to be different from yours. Therefore, commentary about Valve’s needs and choices may or may not be relevant to your use-case.

If you’re new, I recommend mint. Because of ubuntu’s questionable choices at times vs debian’s steady hand, I recommend the debian edition of mint, LMDE. It’s a rolling distribution that requires fewer total reinstalls. Debian’s low-effort stability and security works for nearly all use-cases. Mint adds user-friendly settings, updates, and package management.

Cinnamon is mint’s desktop environment, what they add on top of ubuntu or debian. Like xfce, it’s lighter-weight and more responsive than plasma or gnome on lower-end or aging hardware, but it’s prettier than xfce without rice. Although if you wanna rice and make it pretty, check out a tiling window manager.

Let Valve handle the complex stuff and hire employees to stress-test the latest packages in Arch and just use what they package for you in proton. Start with a debian derivative. If you start wanting to tinker around because you’re getting comfortable, or for some reason desperately need a newer version of a package, you can try software from other package management schemes like guix or flatpak that run on top of your stable debian system.

When you’re comfortable with using the command line tools and managing the gnu operating system, you can try a more command-line centered and manually assisted distros like arch and gentoo

This is, uh, pretty far into deep lore. Just use mint, you'll be fine.

It's really not so bad. You would likely be fine with a beginner-friendly distro like Ubuntu or Mint. Personally I use Ubuntu because it tends to be the most supported by application developers and things generally just work, it's kind of boring stable IMO to the point where I almost want to start distro hopping and trying out something other than Ubuntu.

Though I'd recommend trying it out in a VM first to get a feel for it, and then also trying to live boot it from a USB and see how you like it.

Nothing about what he said would prevent you from using a casual user focused variant like Ubuntu. The biggest challenge you'll potentially run into is drivers and/or having hardward that just doesn't play nice with linux. I'd suggest just giving an install a try and see how it goes. The experience has come a long long way in the past decade.

True, but the desktop environment that they develop in-house is what I grade them on. Not the color themes and backgrounds that they put on desktop environments produced by other projects. You can install other desktop environments on any linux distro. Ubuntu only produces Unity.