If you are looking for a Debian-based release for the desktop, take a look at Pop!_OS. If you can look past the appalling bad taste in naming, it's great. The software "shop" GUI makes it very easy to pick between .deb or flatpak (where available), but of course you can do it all from the CLI.

It has sane defaults (if you are OK with Gnome) and easy installation of (non-free) nVidia drivers / CUDA / tensorflow. Steam works out of the box.

It's as close as any OS (Mac/Windows) or other linux distro I've used to being ready to go from the first login, and staying that way with minimal fuss.