Bazzite is based on Fedora so you can get alot of the same tooling setup to run your games without the inconveniences of Bazzite. Get protonUp-Qt (if you end up using KDE its in the discover store) and use it to automatically install Proton-GE for you. GE is an improved version of Proton made by GloriousEggroll, it should work with almost every game on Steam.

If you have games outside of Steam I recommend HeroicLauncher. I could never get Lutris to work, but Heroic just works for me. It can also use Proton-GE with non-steam games.

Alternatively you can just add non-steam games to Steam. You can even install Windows only launchers like Battle.net on Linux using Steam and Proton.

The website for finding out which games work on Linux and what customizations might be needed for best performance is: https://www.protondb.com/

Steam manages this for you on any distro it runs on, nowadays you dont even need to worry about it anymore.

Without steam you can run umu-launcher (basically valves solution with steam removed) directly, or use one of the many gui-programs that manage wine/proton prefixes for you like for example bottles.

umu-launcher and the gui solutions require wine or proton, I recommend proton-GE, a soft fork of valves upstream proton with experimental patches and gamefixes added.

You don't have to do anything just click play on Steam most of the time :)

Literally every distro has seamless gaming.

What is your target outside of the gaming aspect? Which package manager do you want to use, which desktop environment, etc. What don’t you like about Bazzite?

If you play through Steam, since using Proton is enabled by default, you just need to install a game.

Sometimes you have to go into the game's Steam settings and manually pick a different Proton version if the game is old (usually an older version) or if the game is very new (Proton Experimental or gloriouseggroll's fork of Proton, ProtonGE, this one being a manual install from gloriouseggroll's GitHub), and you can find user reports on ProtonDB on what version other users have been using;

if you use Steam and GoG or other sources with no launcher, the main third party game launchers (Lutris, Heroic) use UMU by default, which means they leverage Steam's Proton to install and play games, basically doing what Steam does, just outside of the Steam app, therefore the experience there is the same as Steam.

This means that you can use most "normal" distros regardless of what they're marketed for. I've played games the same way on PoP! OS and EndeavourOS, simply plug and play (barring some edge cases).

Native, Flatpak or other doesn't really matter for the most part, though native is usually the most straightforward and hassle-free.

tldr: install any standard distro you like and Steam + alternate launcher and you'll find out that the gaming experience is almost completely plug-and-play

Use protonplus to manage proton versions. I just use proton GE 10-34 and that works 99% of the time

Not an expert either, but Nobara does all the pre-installation stuff and it's a pretty decent distro outside of gaming too. Might be worth a shot (it's Fedora based)

Most people I know have been enthusiastic about cachyos after switching to it.

Currently also running on bazzite, so I can't comment on experience. Bazzite does have it's own quircks due to the immutability. The distroboxes to run software ( both graphical as CLI ) are pretty great once you get used to them. Its nice to be able to install a .deb file in a distrobox if I have no other alternatives available.

Cachy is arch based and having access to the AUR is probably a big +.

Its hard to advise on "I don't like some bazzite things outside of gaming" though. Anything specific you miss/dislike on bazzite? Speed? Immutability?

for Steam I would say you always want it to be natively installed, I wouldn't use Flatpak or Snap for Steam or my web browser

but I use Flatpak for most of my other programs

Try Nobara with Steam, Lutris from flatpak

I'd pick CachyOS over Bazzite, that fixes most things.

i switched to linux early 2025 and still know very little about it. i tried several distros and finally landed on pop!_os, which worked out of the box for me running AMD cpu and RTX 5070. i tried lutris and heroic and bottles but didn't have much luck, definitely because of my lack of linux knowledge, but steam with proton GE latest works fine for 99% of games for me. there's an issue in some games where the mouse doesn't work properly for some reason, but i learned that logging out of the DE and back in fixes it