Aurora, it’s the desktop version of massively popular Bazzite (which targets gaming). That means you’ll find tons of up to date tutorials online (Bazzite tutorials are usually applicable unless they are about the few features Bazzite and Aurora diverge specifically).

I explicitly advise against Ubuntu and Mint for the reasons I outlined here. Ubuntu and Mint have the added downside that almost none of the guides you’ll find about SteamOS will work: Different desktop, different philosophy.

People need to realize that since the success of Steam Deck the “old classics” of newbie recommendations are out of the window and what helps these users the most is a Linux distribution as close as possible to SteamOS but SteamOS is not available for random PCs, so Bazzite/Aurora are currently the way to go. Personally I like Fedora KDE but I shifted my stance since the linked post and trying out Aurora.

Bazzite is great on desktop, it’s just more gaming focused than Aurora

Bazzite is great on desktop

Absolutely but people not interested in autolaunching Steam and other preinstalled launchers can use Aurora which is just the workstation flavor by the same people.

it doesn’t auto launch anything on desktop

it doesn’t auto launch anything on desktop

I installed Bazzite just last weekend and I was definitively greeted by a Steam client login window right after logging into SDDM. No idea what you’re talking about.