bazzite is the way to go imo. it feels light years ahead of all the other gaming focused distros, ive tried all of them. it does take getting used to, but once you figure it out, its rock solid. nothing breaks. its almost boring in a way, lol. everything just works and i basically never have to fix or research anything. ublue has an insane amount of contributors on bazzite in comparison to other gaming distros as well, ive submitted many issues to them and patches are applied quickly. for example: garuda has around 9 contributors, cachyos has around 7, nobara has maybe 10, popos has 39 (some are full time employees). what does bazzite have? 113 or so. but they're also not a typical distro, theyre an image of fedora kinoite/silverblue. a lot of the effort is shunted onto the supermassive org (24k+ contributors) that fedora/rhel is and many of their patches are upstreamed. the update process is very seamless and smooth due to this method of organization.
just remember to install most things through flatpak, distrobox, and brew. and you're set. i love atomic for cluing me into distrobox, distrobox is straight up the laziest way to use linux and i love it. if you need some niche program that some dev only released .deb files for or only fedora/opensuse/aur commandline instructions, its got you. it just works. its somewhat similar to WINE and lets you run any linux distro installer and program as natively as possible.
also look at this fun graph for fedora atomic spins. as an fyi the fedora project as a whole has around 300k active users
its a packet and internet analyzer, im mostly concerned with security issues so i constantly check packets on outgoing connections. for apps where the internet is unimportant i disable their ability to access the internet. the vast majority of security issues are solved by preventing internet access.
occasionally a small project shows up on my radar. usually its an alternative frontend for discord, youtube, etc that has not stellar security but much better than what youtube or discord gives you out of the box. ive submitted maybe 1000 detailed security issues on github to small open source projects, many have been implemented ๐ค