[drnick1]

These are good choices, also consider Arch if you want the most agency over what goes into your system. That being said, you can also build a very minimal system with Debian from the command line with the arch-install-scripts. It's just that Debian stable will freeze relatively old packages for the sake of avoiding breaking updates, such as changes in configuration files that require manual intervention. On a gaming rig however, you will typically want to avoid Debian as you want the latest drivers, latest Proton/Wine, etc. as the performance uplift can be substantial and compatibility keeps improving.

[fsflover]

For the most agency over my system I prefer Qubes OS. I use Debian and Fedora inside VMs. Their mnimized versions are available from the Qubes repositories.