I started on traditional Fedora-KDE 32 as my first time with Linux.

I tend to do things blindly and figure things out as I go/ self-teach as needed.

Needed many extra steps such as setting up RPM Fusion just to be able to install Steam.

Another extra step just to enjoy Hardware Acceleration in your web browser.

Another step if you have an Nvidia GPU.

Ublu projects took all that pain away. 🥹

A much better out of the box experience. Like having batteries included.

Anyway that's my story.

I even made a gist now a bit old/outdated about it when I became a Bazzite enjoyer around the time Fedora had just upgraded to 38.

edit wow that was back when it was still known as Universal Blue-Kinoite.

So much has changed.

We have FSR 4 and HDR support now.

I’ll look into atomic, with my particular learning disability I need to start from the ground up to actually understand it

Given that, if you're truly committed to mutable (and what experience are you basing that decision on?) Fedora will support your partner better, but Arch will teach you faster and has the best documentation. My own trajectory over the last decade or so was Arch -> Fedora -> Bazzite.

That said, as a pretty demanding user (dev, local AI stuff etc), I'd suggest thinking twice more on using the atomic and learning in (an Arch perhaps) distrobox. You'll be getting ahead of the curve, can do all your learning (and breaking of things) in distroboxes without borking your main install, can even distro hop after a fashion (again in distrobox). Give it six months and reassess...