I despise the “flashback to a thing that literally happened five minutes ago to make sure you connect that with whatever just happened/is about to happen.”
Total fucking turnoff. I’m here watching the show and I’m not an idiot. Flashback to something last season or a number of episodes ago? Fine. Some people need a reminder. Within the same episode? GTFO of here with that shit.
I’m no expert so take this with an appropriately sized grain of salt.
You should be able to install KDE on whatever distribution you decide. If you want KDE 6, you may have to add a repo, but it should be as simple as
sudo <package manager install incantation> whatever-KDE-is-named-in-the-repo
If you want stability, Debian is the go to, but the tradeoff there is older packages. However if manjaro is working for you, don’t fix what isn’t broken. I don’t know how good Debian is for gaming, but honestly any distribution should be just fine for dev. Considering what steam has done with Arch as the base, it may be worth considering Arch as an option.
To the partitions, I’m not knowledgeable enough to make recommendations as to what you should or shouldn’t touch. My instinct is to not touch
/boot/efi
Something can definitely go wrong when playing with partitions, so make that backup of everything as planned and test it before you make any changes to the system.