AnIndefiniteArticle

Also a BSD-based project.

OpenBSD is one of the few projects that still has the quaint, hobbyist, releases a song with every release of their OS vibe.

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.

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

I don’t know the anime either, but the steam logo is walking away from the debian logo and then staring into the eyes of the arch logo. OP is saying that valve made the right choice by ditching debian (I thought they were using ubuntu, but that’s just a debian derivative with a bad UI on top) for arch as the basis for steamOS. For a gaming platform, I agree. You want the latest updates and software versions for gaming purposes (and proton/wine purposes), and they can hire employees to ensure they have tackled arch’s bleeding-edge instabilities before rolling the updates out to the general population.