I use KDE Neon on my laptop and I’d prefer to have KDE as a DE on this one too (if possible) but I don’t mind a non Ubuntu base. Basically I’d just like to be able to play games on it without much hassle but I know how to paste commands into the terminal if the need arises.
I use Nobara, moved to it from Neon myself after the debacle that was the rebase to 24.04. It’s Fedora based and you can get it with regular KDE or their own customized version. It’s Fedora with special mods made by GloriousEggroll (the dev behind Proton-GE) to improve performance mostly for gaming though the improvements can be of benefit to other applications as well. It was probably the most popular “gaming” distro until Bazzite became the hot new thing. Give it a try and see how it runs on your hardware.
I don’t think my GPU is recent enough for Nobara. That’s what I wanted to use initially. Haven’t actually tried it yet though.