I'll disagree with Taiyang about Manjaro; I think it diverges too much form Arch and much prefer EndeavourOS (which is what I'm using at the moment).

With that said, I wouldn't recommend anything Arch-based for a first timer. Quick sidebar: in Linux the "distribution" (the OS, basically - the variant of Linux) is separate from the desktop environment (the GUI). SteamOS uses the KDE desktop. If you like that, I think I'd recommend Kubuntu as a good Linux distro to start with. It's Ubuntu with KDE instead of the default Ubuntu desktop, so there's a ton of documentation and pretty much every app will work on it.

!linux@lemmy.ml is very active and a great place to ask questions and/or read up, or feel free to DM me!

Like taiyang said, SteamOS is based on Arch which is super not newbie friendly, but the desktop modes "desktop environment" is KDE which available on pretty much any Linux distro, including beginner friendly ones like (K)Ubuntu and Fedora (although I'm not sure how beginner friendly Fedora is, regarding proprietary drivers and codecs)

Oh, you're like me! I did the dive into Linux, SteamOS is a fork of Arch Linux which is super not newbie friendly.

Manjaro is a good Arch Linux fork that works well for gamers, though. Still not idiot proof, as I can atest to breaking it several times, but that's the deal when you remove the training wheels off your OS.

Lucky it's easy to reinstall from a USB. A little less if you insist on a duel boot like me, but that's mostly Windows being a jerk.

It is SteamOS based on Gentoo.

Steam deck runs SteamOS, a custom distro built by steam specifically. You can download it here

Try manjaro, and hear me out here:

Manjaro is actually the only distro that I would recommend to a beginner, actual beginner in this case is someone that should not be running a single terminal command to get their system to work (which is what people are expecting to do when they tell you to use Endevour or CachyOS lol)

WIth ubuntu/debian based distros you will either have to deal with installing flatpaks/snaps, which come with their own set of issues like not following the system theme, using the wrong system font, issues accesing the internet, issues accesing the home directory (yeah steam flatpak can't be placed in the home directory lol).

You could try adding PPAs which is not something I would recommend a beginner to do.

Also some games like BeamNG hate having irqbalance, which usually comes by default on debian based distros.

On the other hand Manjaro already ships with pamac which is their GUI store that supports everything, including Aur packages which means 0 issues having to deal with broken permissions or theming if you want to install apps that are usually not found in the official repos.

Their own official repo even includes brave-browser and fastfetch, two apps that I use that are usually very hard to find in other distros.