Any reason why I shouldn’t just go with Debian + KDE and install Steam?

No reason to avoid Debian unless you have hardware so very new that it requires the very latest kernel to operate.

If you go with Debian Stable, you can enable Backports for a fairly recent kernel, currently 6.5.10. You could go with Testing or even Unstable if you’re addicted to upgrading as often as possible, but chances are you won’t need to.

I’m gaming on Debian Stable with Steam in a flatpak. It works great, and is blissfully low maintenance.

At some point, you’ll probably run into people claiming that Debian is bad for gaming performance because of “outdated” packages. In most cases, those people don’t know what they’re talking about. I suggest ignoring them unless they identify a specific performance issue that actually affects you.

Thanks for making me aware of this project. Maybe I’ll get to play the original game after all. :)

reverse engineering of the said port

BTW, that should be either “the” or “said”. Not both.

Whichever one you enjoy using.

Unless you have some special hardware need, all the desktop distros perform about the same. (Even long-term support releases, which offer newer kernels in case you need them.)

That leaked email conveniently assumes the owner of Valve would sell it. I can’t think of a reason for Gabe to do that.

I do my gaming on Bookworm with a handful of extras, and it works very well.

There is a certain group of people who insist that only the distros with the latest packages are good for gaming. Those people are wrong in most cases.

Unless you have a very new GPU (released less than a year ago), your games are not likely to get any benefit from the latest kernel.

Unless your games require the very latest Vulkan features and you run them without Steam, Flatpak, or any other platform that provides its own Mesa, you’re not likely to get any benefit from a distro providing the latest version of it.

Practically everything else that games need is comparable across all the major distros, so choose one that makes you happy, not one that some shill claims is best for gaming. Even Debian Stable, contrary to the undeserved bashing it often gets by a certain kind of gamer, is generally excellent for gaming.