I use regular bookworm with steam/Mesa/proton installed as flatpak

Works great, 10/10

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.

I use sid as my daily driver with official debiam steam packages etc, everything is really smooth since long time so if you want to try you should :)

You could use distrobox for gaming, make an arch one and game from there without worrying about dependencies

For what it's worth, Mint has a Debian-based version that I've heard great things about. It would probably have lots of the legwork done for you (getting flatpak, etc).

You should definitely just use what you like. If you're going with Debian, maybe go with stable instead of sid. Your games will work. Distros that are being labeled as "gaming" just have some things added for convenience, saving steps after installation. Hopping around is not necessarily a bad thing, either. I've used different ones over the years from different branches. It's good to know how they work. I can pacman. I can apt. I can dnf. I even used to apt-get and yum.

I use Sid for gaming and it has always worked perfectly. I am very happy with it.

I don't use Sid, but testing, it's working almost flawlessly. Each release (once every 2 years, I guess), I take few hours to check everything work; remove shader cache, etc.

My setup, right now (dirty, for authenticity) :

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb-src https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

deb https://security.debian.org/debian-security/ testing-security main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb-src https://security.debian.org/debian-security/ testing-security main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

# bullseye-updates, to get updates before a point release is made;
# see https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch02.en.html#_updates_and_backports
deb https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing-updates main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb-src https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing-updates main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

# add by me
deb https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing-backports main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb-src https://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing-backports main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*
deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/graphics:/darktable/Debian_Testing/ /
deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/lutris.gpg] https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/strycore/Debian_Testing/ ./
# Uncomment these lines to try the beta version of the Steam launcher
#deb [arch=amd64,i386 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ beta steam
#deb-src [arch=amd64,i386 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ beta steam
deb [arch=amd64,i386] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ stable steam 
deb-src [arch=amd64,i386] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ stable steam 

# Uncomment these lines to try the beta version of the Steam launcher
# deb [arch=amd64,i386] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ beta steam 
# deb-src [arch=amd64,i386] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ beta steam 


deb [arch=amd64,i386 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ stable steam
deb-src [arch=amd64,i386 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg] https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ stable steam
deb [ signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/vscodium-archive-keyring.gpg ] https://download.vscodium.com/debs/ vscodium main 

I play a lot, we just played Grounded with friend yesterday.

Hope this helps.

No idea if it works, but debian stable as base and distrobox for the games?

ive gamed on just about every distro i've tried but i currently run debian sid its fine, linux is linux for the most part. kernel is recent enough so youre not gonna have to do any workarounds or anything.

Yes? ;)

Lxc arch with glx /devs passthrough, runs steam and steam games beautifully.

This is my workflow though, I have an lxc for work/development, an lxc for everything really, once you fit it in its just second nature.

The debian host is there for wm more than anything.

I've been using Trixie (Current testing, next stable) for gaming for a couple weeks. Everything (gaming wise) works the same as it did when I was on Arch.

Probably not what you're looking for but Nobara is great.

I am on a laptop, and it works fine.

I'm using debian because it's the distro I work with, so I'm the most comfortable with it.