You'll get plenty of answers with different suggestions, so I'll suggest checking in that community for plenty of previous answers.
I would say to stick with "main" known distribution and to ditch specialized ones.
linux-myths.pages.dev/Single-M…
linux-myths.pages.dev/Distros

I'm on Nobara but despite the fantastic work of GloriousEggRoll, it did had it's lot of breakage which made me want to switch to the suggested uBlue Fedora atomic builds, per those criterias.

It's always the top 10 once enough people chime in, because any can work and it's easy enough to install or select what you need on most of them. (I'd probably recommend mint).

But... hardware is probably more important. Cutting edge GPU might not have good drivers yet. AMD is probably going to be much better supported. Networking you're probably good now, but getting more popular stuff means it's more likely to already have had the kinks worked through years ago. If you play popular multiplayer shooters with shitass anti cheat malware it probably won't work.

Some tips for lazy Linux gaming setup:

Install flatpak and flatpak steam

Install the ProtonPlus flatpak if you need custom proton versions for some games, I usually just add the latest proton-ge and don't have to bother with anything else

Fedora, Arch, EndeavourOS, Nobara and Bazzite are all pretty good bases for a gaming setup. They all have their pain points so I'd boot a couple and see how you like them before making a decision.

I made the switch 2-3 months ago, and I went with Kubuntu. It's absolutely fine, but if I knew then what I know now I'd likely have gone pop or mint, just to not bother with snaps (although they're pretty easy to get rid of).

As others have said, get Ventoy on a USB stick, use that to have a play with a few live environments and get a feel for what desktop environment you might want to use. KDE and Cinnamon I think are pretty good Desktop Environments if you're used to Windows, but have some fun with it and also try a few that are very different to windows, you might find yourself liking them (I really like using i3 on my laptop where the screen is fairly low res)

I've gone through several installs (mint, neon, vanilla, tumbleweed, manjaro). The distro I've ended up sticking with has been EndeavourOS.

For three simple reasons:
- when I want to install something, someone has usually already put in the work and made it easily available on the AUR
- if something breaks, there is an easy way to recover as long as you set it up in advance (snapshots)
- bleeding edge, you get updates quickly, latest KDE, latest kernel, latest everything

Basically, the low ease of use of arch is addressed by EndeavourOS, and its "instability" is addressed by timeshift. All you're left with is how easy it is to get your system to run whatever you might want it to run.

What I did is install EndeavourOS with btrfs, then first thing run sudo yay -S pamac to install a GUI for managing software discovery, installation and updates.

Next, timeshift, timeshift-systemd-timer and timeshift-autosnap. The systemd package enables timeshift to maintain scheduled snapshots, and the autosnap package automatically creates snapshots whenever you install or update something, so you can always go back to right before changing your system.

Run timeshift to set it up, and you're good to go.

I'm not amd guy..
I've used Intel and Nvidia for ages and ages.. when my last upgrade failed hardware wise... I bought a Intel minipc from Beelink with an Intel ultra 5 125h.

It came with windows 11.

I'm a dad of a 1 yr old. who is playing stardew with his wife right now.

Ive formatted a handful of times to different Linux distros to see which felt better for me on this PC.

Manjaro, kubuntu, Debian, kde neon.

Currently I'm running kde neon. Out of the box it likes to reboot on updates.. so I found a non-sudo needed cli command to fix that. (It's a setting apparently in settings)

Anyway...l say all this to say.. the way steam is now.. and how graphics cards are.. you can pretty well run what you want.

Granted it's antidotal from me... But as long as you're not buying the absolute latest stuff from a hardware vendor... You'd be fine.

If I was buying now I'd probably not buy the Intel chips that are having troubles but the gen before that.. and probably some 3xxx Nvidia card.

And not hesitate to run any distro I wanted.

Ps I like apt.. because that's what I'm comfy with. So I tend to use distros that use apt.
Tho manjaro is nice because of the aur... But they have issues company wise

I’ve been bouncing around Linux distros since 2007.

I’ve been a big Ubuntu fan but Bazzite has absolutely blown me away, especially for gaming. Everything just works out of the box. No tweaking, no driver installations, no troubleshooting.

My multi monitor display and dock with peripherals (including webcam and wireless headset) just works with a single USB connection on the dock.

Call me a shill for bazzite but if you are just using the pc like a windows user would to play games, you won’t go wrong with it. I could basically say the same for any Ubuntu or Fedora distro but from my experience, those require some tweaking for everything to work nice.

Well I had downloaded a few to try out, but the first one I installed (Pop OS) just worked right away so I stuck with it.

Although if you are considering a new PC, do go for an AMD GPU. Will save you a lot of hassle (like it did me).

As much as I want to agree to this, a part of me screams "STOP FANBOYING CORPORATIONS"

Lemme tell you a short story about bait and switch

We all know that android is a collaboration of companies to have an open handset ecosystem (which is weird, because these are companies driven for profit)

one of these companies is quallcomm, they were so nice that they released an open source "bridge" for devs to thier hardware called codeauroraforums

Thier marketshare grew and the performance of thier hardware were miles ahead the competition

Then it came when these "subpar" and cheaper semicons caught up on thier performance and also...covid happened

it shrank quallcomms earnings, made them to make some "decisions" and one of them is killing codeauroraforums, switched thier "opensource" stuff to codelinaro in which, all of the hardware supported are devkits of thier struggling snapdragon x

In addition to these decisions to increase earnings, they also made a deal with microsoft to make laptop chipsets (just like what apple did. Unfortunately, barebone windows on arm is different from windows on snapdragon unlike apple with thier walled garden wherein they've designed thier chips inhouse)

now they're finger pointing who'll support that thing, lmao

So...uhm..yea, stop fanboying corporations and thank you for listening to my ted talk

btw AMD is cool with linux...for now

Nice! I left Windows behind a few months ago as well. Had been dual booting Ubuntu and Windows since Windows 7.

Tried to primarily game on Ubuntu about a decade ago but it just didn’t work out well at the time so I had to keep Windows around. Fast forward to this past year with Windows 10 quickly approaching EoL and (me personally) not being a fan of the direction Canonical is taking Ubuntu I started looking at other options.

Ended up learning about Bazzite and haven’t looked back. Was able to play almost my entire game’s library without much effort. I had planned on dual booting two Linux operating systems so I could separate work from play, but decided to stick with one.

Exciting! Sort of interestingly, I never dual booted or anything, I just jumped straight to Linux.

Honestly, it's really not that bad. Linux has come a long way since I started out, and while I usually make it harder for myself than it needs to be, I've seen young middle schoolers installing and using Linux, I've seen retired professional musicians with no technical background install and use Linux. Especially with all these new fancy atomic desktops, like Silverblue, Bazzite, and Kinoite. Admittedly, I have managed to break a Kinoite installation (doing stuff I probably shouldn't have been doing), but fixing it felt magical. Just roll back to when it wasn't borked, then update it.

I did a lot of not so nice things to that installation (it was a bit of a test, to see how fragile it was), and it's still running now!

I agree with not overly fanboying, but "they might stop support" can literally happen with any platform. If AMD stops open source support, they're in the same boat as NVIDIA but with a leg up from having all the history an experience from the time with support.

Your favorite distro could go out of support and have the project closed tomorrow, just like Windows 10 reaching EoL. Except someone else can fork that distro and pick up the mantle to continue the project.

That game that you really want to play on Linux might suddenly choose to implement an anti-cheat or DRM that isn't compatible with Linux, or a different game might choose to remove that block and it suddenly opens up for the Linux community.

That has not been my experience...
amdgpindriver was crashing quite often, gfx ring 0 timeout. Tons of people with that problem forums. I managed to adjust some parameters and fix it eventually.

VRR doesn't work properly, I can get it to work, burnout is a shore every time.

I have both and nvidia and an amd GPU, and with xwayland fixed, the nvidia one can run just as well.

That said, paying 2k for a GPU to have raytracing and 24gb of RAM isn't that attractive.

Nice! I wish my issues were limited to those fixable ones.

I have issues with sound card SPDIF not working and Bluetooth on the intel WiFi card not wanting to switch on. Both known bugs with no fixes in the pipeline.

Will need to wait for my next PC upgrade in 5 years time.

I got about 15% better minimum frame rates under Linux and only one of my recent games had issues with anti-cheat.

As far as user friendlyness for new users I usually recommend Mint (Cinnamon desktop) / ZorinOS Core (customized Gnome desktop)/ TuxedoOS (KDE Desktop).

Choose accordingly to your preferred desktop environment and enjoy.

Zorin OS - Make your computer better.

Discover the alternative to Windows and macOS designed to make your computer faster, more powerful, secure, and privacy-respecting.

^Zorin

Same thing happened to me recently, like literally 2 days ago. I’ve been wanting to switch for good for years, but always ended up having some problem pop up that I would try to deal with, and eventually go back to windows.

Well, 2 nights ago, I’m playing a game on steam. Middle of a boss fight, my computer just shuts down to start installing windows updates. When it finally finished, not only did I lose my progress, but because the game was not shut down correctly, it corrupted several files and needed a reinstall.

I literally used Chris Titus Techs Win10 tool to disable windows updates until I choose to run them, as well as ShutUp10 to disable ALL M$’s bullshit.

Update happened anyway, and sure enough, all their spyware had been re-enabled. At that point, I started asking around online for recommendations on what would work best for my use cases, with a few specific tools I needed. In the past, I had used several distros that really didn’t do what I needed, or would get me 90% of the way there. Problem was, that other 10% was a pretty important 10%. Someone told me to try just regular old vanilla Fedora. I did, actually learned how to setup, configure, and use Gnome extensions to get it to look and feel the way I want it to. Been having the best experience ever; EVERYTHING just works out of the box. At this point, I have successfully and fully converted!

Edit: grammar and typos

Which Linux OS would folks recommend? OP asking you as well haha.

I'll throw Tumbleweed into the pile of recommendations.

It comes with a rollback utility called Snapper configured OOTB. This was a big one for me and it's what stopped me distrohopping. The only reason I didn't stick with TW the first time I tried it (years ago) was because of issues getting my Nvidia card to work.

You can install Snapper yourself on other distros of course, but I've read that it's sometimes not a trivial undertaking.

Note: Ventoy adds something to the boot params that causes issues for some, so heads up if you decide to try TW off of Ventoy.

This was me a few months ago when I started seeing ads in start menu. I love Linux and use it for work but was worried about things like VRR, scaling, HDR support, periperhal support etc. While a lot of those things are still a WIP I have had no major issues (except occasional anticheat borked but even then rarely).

I ended up going bazzite and I'm really liking it. What distro you go with OP?

I have a 7800XT on Linux and I want to point out that I still run into their "drm_fec_ready" and "no edid read" bugs every day.

amdgpu is miles ahead of what NVIDIA is offering, but it is still a GPU driver on a second class platform. Do not expect a flawless experience on bleeding edge hardware.

You've basically described my situation exactly. I built a PC 6 months ago for Linux. I distro-hopped for a good while and settled on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Now I've put OpenSUSE on my laptop too. I would highly recommend it.

I went for an AMD GPU and have never had any problems with it. Linux is not as painless as Lemmy would have you believe though. Be prepared to learn some hard lessons and keep your data physically disconnected from the PC while you do it.

You've asked about WiFi drivers further down....on my PC, the only distros that had the correct WiFi drivers out of the box were EndeavourOS and ZorinOS. The rest all needed wired LAN to get them going.

I recommend endeavouros - it's on arch (personally my favorite, btw), has a bunch of desktop environments you can pick from that come configured nicely out of the box, nice presets and well commented configs, etc. Install and setup are super easy, they also include installing your driver's and such.

For getting games to work, most games work out of the box on steam (just make sure to enable proton for all titles and you're set). Some games will require some changes to the launch command which you can super easily find with just searching {game title} Linux. There are some that straight up don't work, and most likely no tinkering will fix that - but it's primarily fps and competitive games with kernal level anticheat. It's getting better with fewer and fewer games using it though. Since you already have a steak deck you already know the process most likely so you should be able to hit the ground running