PikaOS is Debian with the latest drivers and hardware and selective updates where needed. It's basically perfect for me and I've been daily driving it on 3 different PCs (2 Nvidia 1 AMD) for more than a year now with zero regrets or significant issues. I did pop into the discord with a few speed bumps and questions that were quickly answered.

https://wiki.pika-os.com/en/home

this should tick all your boxes.

I run on debian-testing otherwise my resolution sucked. On newish AMD cpu and GPU.

I am not a Linux person except for proxmox box, but I saw this on lemmy yesterday, and it talks about nvidia drivers on Debian 13

https://teejeetech.com/2025/08/14/debian_13_tips/

The things I've been reading for years about Debian make me think most "linux" people really don't know or understand what stable/unstable means.

I ran mint (non debian) on older hardware for years and loved it mostly.

Upgraded everything in march and realised i needed newer kernel newer mesa. I could of installed from certain ppa's but hey 12-13 years on one distro i fancied a change.

Kde took some learning (does one need all those settings) but hey functional hardware is the goal and the goal was met. Like graphics tablet i had to mess with modprobe and .sh files just works magnificently.

I can't compare performance as 8 thread to 24 thread i do not see a fair comparison.

Leaving the comfort zone i think made me understand more about linux and that is very good.

Ubuntu-based, Arch-based, Fedora-based distributions will do you fine.

Debian is great for having a rock solid stable system that works, but not for the latest and greatest software or hardware combis.

I knew which video you were talking about before I even clicked the link.

Don't use Debian for a gaming PC. Period.

Stick with an Ubuntu derivative like Mint or Kubuntu. It's your best bet.

If you want a gaming exclusive platform, you might want to check out Bazzite as well. But the *buntus are best IMO.