Well, this can only reflect my experience @pyromaiden@lemmygrad.ml but I tried to get a whole bunch of other distros going and nothing worked properly until I tried Zorin. On the plus side it looks and feels very close to Windows, so after 48 hours I was completely autonomous and doing the crazy linux stuff on my PC. During install do not check "connect to the internet to download updates" you'll just update manually with sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade. This is a common cause of installs breaking.

Drivers were installed out of the box including Nvidia CUDA 13 which was a nice surprise. Everything else was up to date too, printer and bluetooth headset worked right away with no fiddling. Wifi too of course.

Since it works on an Ubuntu base (same one as Mint) there is sufficient information online. They also have a very complete forum you can google for. But usually when I run into an issue I just ask deepseek about it and because there's a lot of ubuntu info to train on, it finds a fix.

I think Bazzite since it's more gaming-focused locks down some areas of the OS. I'm sure you can get access but that's one thing to think about - if this is your main computer, you want a full OS, not something that will only/mostly do gaming and annoy you with anything else. But at the end of the day all of these are linux.

One thing I tell everyone is get Timeshift and set up hourly saves on a different drive from your OS drive. If something breaks you can then just timeshift back a couple hours and get a working system back in order. It saved me already once when flatpak suddenly decided to stop accepting its own PGP key.

For gaming specifically Zorin comes with what they call Windows App Installer. It basically runs Wine into a prefix (an instance of the C drive) that is system-wide. A lot of games just work once you have installed the various runtimes (Visual C++, .net) into that prefix. Then you just right click the .exe, Select Launch with... and click Windows App Installer. A lot of games just work with that. Otherwise, I add them on Lutris which sometimes works better or allows me to select a more specific Wine version.

On top of Lutris you can install ProtonUp-Qt to download more Proton versions for Lutris to use. But most of the time I don't need specifically Proton, the default ge-8.26-x86_64 wine works great on almost every game. ProtonDB is not the end-all be-all mind you, it's what other users reported worked or didn't on their computer. With Lutris and the ability to add every single Proton version to it, it's just about trying every other version until you find something that works - if it doesn't the first time. Sometimes a game works with Proton 9.x but not 10.x, go figure.

For games with kernel anti-cheat - there's also an app called WinBoat that might be able to play them? It emulates a whole Windows instance for that app specifically from what I understand. I haven't tried it yet, I wanted to set it up for Photoshop if I ever get around to it. Apparently though PS works great with WinBoat without having to set up a whole VM, so that's a good sign.