Anything in the Ubuntu family tree, Pop!_OS, Mint, etc would probably be fine. Mint is sort of a cousin of Ubuntu at this point. It still uses apt but has it's own software store. Most of the time you are fiddling with something, instructions for Ubuntu will work on Mint. I usually recommend Mint because it has a good out of the box experience like the @someone@hexbear.net said.

Regarding fitgirl repacks. I've tried with Armored Core 6 and Disco Elysian but couldn't get either to install correctly. I didn't poke around to hard though. You have vanilla WINE, Steam's Proton, the Glorious Eggroll fork of Proton and even Lutris to play around with when getting Windows games to run. I've had like a 98% success rate with Proton through Steam but that might be an issue if you are worried about DRM. Idk why anyone pirates lol. I do because I'm poor and hate capitalism.

I have been using Linux full time for a decade now and program as a hobby so as long as you aren't using, like, C# you should be fine. I use Codium which is the telemetry-free fork of VS Code and it's been a flawless experience. Eclipse and Java is clunky but it's like that on Windows too imo.