Zorin seems like it's great for casual use but I wouldn't recommend it for gaming

I've used Zorin for about a year now and excluding that issue where the syslog fills up to a ridiculous size I'd say it's still a solid choice for casual use cases. Where Zorin falls short would be with Steam which whether anyone likes it or not is kinda what most of gaming demographic is using on PC including myself.

So far Zorin is the only distro I've used where Steam just crashes my whole system multiple times and it's had other issues like the time being stuck in the 24 hour format, big picture mode being slow if you don't directly start Steam in bpm, and the virtual keyboard not fully working some reason. I can't say for sure if those three issues are specifically a Zorin thing or just an Ubuntu thing all together as I've been using Fedora KDE lately and it's been so much smoother with Steam. I can display the time in a 12 hour format and I can switch to bpm without issues. Still haven't tried out the virtual keyboard yet but I'm hoping it just works.

Even if you exclude Steam there's the issue of having an older glibc. Yes you can get around it using distrobox which I wrote a tutorial about but not having to do any of that configuring just to use an appimage is nice. Thankfully most appimages don't demand the newest glibc.

I'm still using Zorin for now as I'm not certain of Fedora being my new main distro so I'm doing a bit of distro hopping. I really tried to like Zorin but I ultimately think it's not for me in the long run.

As an FYI, and I want to be clear it's a proposal and there's substantial debate, it's been proposed that Fedora drop all 32-bit support in the near future. This would break Steam, as it requires 32-bit libraries. The technical details are over my head, but the Bazzite team (Bazzite is Fedora based) has said that even building just the libraries Steam officially depends on wouldn't cut it, and that if Fedora moved to eliminate 32-bit support, it would likely mean the end of Bazzite altogether.

I haven't had the problems with Steam you've described, at least in terms of stability--I don't use big picture mode and virtually never use the overlay, so I'm actually not sure if they'd trouble me. I use the .deb version of Steam as provided by Valve themselves. On a couple occasions I've had a dependency issue that was actually a result of an issue with the graphics-drivers PPA rather than Steam, but they fixed that after I contacted them, and these days I install from Nvidia's .run file anyway.

On the whole, I agree with your subject line, as I prefer newer components, but that's not the nature of Ubuntu based distros, thus upgrading my kernel and drivers myself. The older glibc in particular is a sore spot for me as it keeps me off of Plasma 6 on Zorin, and yet... here I am. I must not be that upset.

(Edited to remove a "not" that got in when I changed thoughts mid-sentence, and which completely made the sentence false. >_<)

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The day I mention it, the proposal gets retracted.

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The main Difference between Zorin and Fedora is that Fedora is not a LTS Distro. So, it has more up-to-date Packages. And when that is neccessary for Your Use Case, then Fedora is the better Choice for You.

Only for interest: Did You used Steam as Flatpak or .deb on Zorin? And if .deb: Did You use the Package from the Repo or from the Steam Website?

I believe I used the apt install from the repo. Still have no idea if Steam is still crashing from using the steam chat but some update must had got pushed to the repo because the issue I had with big picture mode being really slow when switching to it is gone. I had the same issues with the flatpak version but I never tried the deb file provided by Steam I think.

Sadly Fedora is kinda a bust for me. I tried installing multimedia codecs as it's missing lots of proprietary stuff due to legal issues but that ended up breaking it so I'll probably give Bazzite a go as it already has that stuff from the get go.

You might try Nobara. It's Fedora based, but unlike Bazzite, it's not immutable. One of its main goals is to include enough out of the box for end users not to have to go to a lot of work on proprietary stuff.

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And did You tried it with the downloadable Version from Steam itself:

Beneath @Locklear93's Suggestion with Nobara, there would be the Option to use Debian Unstable. Or an Arch-based Distro like Endeavour OS for Example. Solus would be an Option, too.