Thank you guys so much for all your recommendations and thoughts! After some further analysis I decided to install Bazzite for the following reasons:

• shares a lot of similarities with other Atomic distros
• but has all the nice gaming related things pre-installed and configured and it uses a properly pre-installed Steam (not the Flatpak version) (the main reason why I chose it over Aurora, which would have been my next best pick)
• my qemu virtual machines run perfectly fine (also the shared folder)
• some dev stuff already pre-installed (don’t think I need more than there already is)
• fast and the OS feels like made out of one block, very consistent
• I was ready to use my machine like I want to in basically no time
• I already love the atomic way of handling updates
• so far no issues

The only thing left for me to do is to figure out how to properly install SyncThing and Zerotier-One, then I am absolutely set.

Oh, this sounds good! Thanks a lot!

I think I will opt for one of the atomic distros like Bazzite or Aurora, since yes, it seems very interesting and a nice project, but learning Nix just to get eventually a working system running again won’t be the right thing for me. But I will definitely load it into a VM and try it out when I have more time at hands!

Void sounds interesting to tinker around with it but I don’t want to tinker anymore. It is fine for me to have a reasonable learning curve in the beginning, but I just want something that works once set up and that goes out of my way.

Additionally, Void is still a rolling release distro so the same downside to it applies to Arch and vice versa. Arch is not unstable per se, it just depends on the packages you are using.

Thank you, haven’t heard of it yet, and will look into it!

Sell it to me, please