I switched to Cachyos KDE a week ago. It's the best distro I've used (previously I ran Debian KDE, and Mint Cinnamon before that). I have a GTX 1070 ti and it set up with zero issues. Steam installed perfectly, and I used AUR to install the gaming-meta package.

I'm a Linux Mint user and I've not had many problems using Steam as a Flatpak.

Tumbleweed. Stable rolling release distro.

I've been enjoying EndeavorOS on Plasma.

Linux Mint Xfce

Mint because it doesn't break often and usually fixes are simple enough, and Xfce because, though I don't know how well it fares compared to others nowadays, it was the variant that would run the lightest in a previous computer I had some years ago, so I grew attached to it.

Also besides Steam, Heroic (for GOG, EGS and Amazon Prime) and Mitch (for Itchio) work fine on it.

I use it for general things as well, but I have MX Linux on my laptop and it works well enough for the type of games I play ( nothing all that requirement heavy ). Steam's Proton works fine. So does WINE for modern games.

I've tried WINE without any tinkering on a couple old abandonware games ( 3D-Ultra Minigolf and some other game ) and both had issues with scaling, fitting into their borderless window, and crashing when selecting a menu button thing. So, older titles like those might be out of the question... if I don't try them on DOSBox.

Windows 11 :/

Though heavily neutered, where even defender is disabled.

I boot CachyOS Linux with a lot of tuning (and some recent game testing). A linux gaming OS! I'm using Cachy like 95% of the time; I am not anti linux.

But honestly... It's just not worth a few lost features and performance hit over Windows for me, on top of the extra hassle. Its easier to just reboot. Maybe the experience is different on AMD GPUs, but I suspect Nvidia is at a disadvantage here.

This is on a desktop. Based on my experience with a RTX 2060 laptop I used to have, you also have the to deal with graphics switching, rendering on one device while displayong on another, and making sure your 1050 actually goes to sleep when not in use.

PopOS. Lots of folks recommend bazzite for gaming though.

I was running a GTX 1660ti and an i7 until yesterday using CachyOS. Worked great! Though for older cards, I might recommend a LTS distro to ensure you retain support (Mint is my go-to recommendation).

Arch, all flatpacked.

Be aware support for 1050 on 580 version of driver is ending so rolling release distos can make u a problem when they will upgrade version higher than 580

What I've found is that what works bet for your preferences and build is best. When I had an Nvidia card, Pop!_OS worked best for stable performance. I'm not a fan of Gnome though and it got me to upgrade to an AMD card and I've moved to Bazzite with no regrets.

Mint. I've been happy with it. I'm more familiar with debs/apt/Ubuntu so I wanted to stick with something familiar but didn't want to use Ubuntu. It's worked very well for me for gaming. I just upgraded my GPU from an Nvidia card to an AMD card which, aside from having to manually install the drivers from the terminal, has worked very well.

Up to a couple of days ago was using arch linux, now using opensuse tumbleweed.

So far I got the same experience in both, and most of the issues I got were related to my poor understanding on how to properly setup Hyprland when using a minimal installation setup.

I guess the distro itself wont make that much difference.

I'm using Manjaro because I wanted a rolling release distro that focused on kde, and SuSE didn't feel like downloading that day. No problems here

GTX 1080 + i7 4790K here: I run an Arch Linux Wayland setup (labwc) on my machine. So I use this for gaming, too.

I have a handful of native games running without any issues. Other games I run on Steam (installed via Flatpak to avoid the 32 bits dependency hell). Never had any REAL issues that were not coming from Nvidia not running well on Linux or Valve not getting Linux support right.

arch on a walmart gaming laptop, hooked up to an old external monitor