Mint is often the most recommended distro, because whatever you may need to do in it, it tends to be easy-ish to figure out.

But these days I would strongly recommend in favor of some immutable distro like Bluefin/Aurora or Silverblue/kinoite. Instead of being easy to figure out how to do things on them, they make it so you won’t need to, ever.

It’s a complete paradigm shift and it might not be for everyone, but in the decades I’ve been using Linux for, I had never had such a smooth experience with any distro. Everything just works and you don’t need to think about the OS anymore.

However it won’t easily fit with some of the requirements you listed.

In theory, yes. In practice, dealing with games is not so straightforward. Even the steam deck’s “suspend” is still far behind the Nintendo switch’s. In some games (older stuff, usually) the games don’t get paused at all, or it pauses the image but keeps the sound playing, or even sometimes appears to work properly, but then drains your battery just as fast as it you were playing - suggesting it is still processing the whole game in the dark.

Are their printers bad? I haven’t even tried any in decades because their business practices are so awful, but I always thought that at the very least the printers themselves should be good.

Sadly, Brother’s printers might be going on the same direction now.

If the competition make some good portables, Valve will probably leave the hardware to them and focus only on the software.