Requirements:
- Must be more user friendly than LFS
- Must not be in the RHEL/IBM family/stream or derivative
- Must not be SLES or derivative
- Does not make you install a desktop environment
- Must have steam
Hopes
- Rolling release
- Has a package manager of some sort
- Doesn’t require manual intervention every six months
- Maintainers aren’t psycho
If you dislike manual interventions, Gentoo is probably not what you want. I mean, my experience is a bit dated, since I stopped using Gentoo in 2009, but oh boy, those half system rebuilds because an important library update, not fun. Maybe OpenSuse Tumbleweed is something you want to look into? Unless you consider it RHEL because it uses RPM packages.
I don’t do SUSE linux enterprise system derivatives. I disagree with their choices