If you want to play games, then Debian isn’t that good of a choice because of the outdated packages. I’d suggest getting a new SSD though. Your HDD is already pretty old and slow and could potentially fail soon, so you might as well get some fresh storage. Makes it easy to test distros too until you found something satisfactory, at which point you can transfer over your old data and eventually format your old HDD into some sort of backup drive I guess.
If you want to play games, then Debian isn’t that good of a choice because of the outdated packages. I’d suggest getting a new SSD though. Your HDD is already pretty old and slow and could potentially fail soon, so you might as well get some fresh storage. Makes it easy to test distros too until you found something satisfactory, at which point you can transfer over your old data and eventually format your old HDD into some sort of backup drive I guess.
You can play games on Debian if you install Steam from Flatpak. It installs everything it needs (drivers, Proton etc.) and just works.
What about your kernel?
You don’t need the latest kernel for games to work, a recent one will do.
Debian uses LTS kernel versions, which have very good support. Debian 12 runs kernel 6.1 which will be supported until the end of 2027.
If you’re using AMD you do, because that’s the majority of your gpu driver.
Linux Mint is a pretty solid option for a desktop OS. And it feels quite a bit like Debian.