For a Linux newcommer, I would recommend an extremely mainstream distro like Mint over some niche gaming one like Zorin, due to having way bigger user bases and online support material in case things go wrong. Everything you can do in one distro can be done in others. If you're playing steam games, basically everything not native works out of the box with their Proton compatibility tool.

I also second Crit's recommendation for Lutris, specially if you're pirating. You can basically use cracked Windows repacks with that. I haven't used Windows in over 10 years now, and over the past 3 or so I've basically not run into any compatibility problems for games.

But you may want to keep a small windows partition if you like playing League of Legends or other aggressively DRM-locked games.

Honestly, I usually dual boot windows and Linux, then if the game I want to play doesn't work on Linux, I just switch to Windows. But recently I've had very few games not work out of the box on Ubuntu. So I wouldn't stress about it too much.

If you want to mostly use Windows, you can trim out all the telemetry and garbage using installation utilities. ( Win Util is the one I used, I think) This makes a much lighter and cleaner windows without the bloat and garbage and spying. (You'll never truly be free of it, but it helps). If you are curious I can try to dig up the method I used.

I find I usually gravitate back to Ubuntu as my default system because I am familiar with it, but I wouldn't say it is the best.

I'm not really seeing anyone ask the big question here, but the obvious answer is it depends on what you want to play. If certain titles that are your preferred picks are completely unplayable on Linux for whatever reason, then it might be a deal breaker for you. Anti cheat, secure boot, DRM and a myriad of other increasingly restrictive systems are making it impossible for a lot of things to work reliably on Linux. Start with proton db, which is a useful site that can help you check if the games you like actually work on Linux, and if you're still sure, then you can safely make your decision.

Most of the popular Linux distros should work for gaming. I'd recommend Fedora or Ubuntu for being easy and tending to just work. I'd recommend against Arch because it's easier to break than most distros. KDE desktop environment can be configured to be lighter on system resources than gnome.

Really to know what you would like best and what works best with your hardware, you should make a USB with ventoy and add a bunch of different .iso files of different distros. Boot into the live environment and mess around, try your peripheral devices, etc. Be warned, live environments are significantly slower than a full install.

I would also recommend checking all of your games on protondb. If any don't work on Linux, you can dual boot.

I am not a gamer but wasn't Bazzite OS specifically forked for gamers? https://bazzite.gg/

@CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml recently moved to Zorin, might have some tips.

any rolling or semi rolling release distro will do, but best to avoud distros that are not that newbie friendly in documentation and the amount of configuration needed (im using opensuse tumbleweed and it has alot of quirks that will turn off newbies), nobara seems like a good fit as it is based on fedora and come preconfigured with the needed codecs and repositories right off the bat.

It's still Win11.

Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora are going to be easiest just by the virtue of being some of the most commonly used with lots of documentation. I think technically Arch might have more documentation but the fact that you're asking tells me you shouldn't use Arch.

Nobara is someone's hobby project, not where I would invest my time, and regarding Bazzite, I'm quoting someone else here, "it may not be perfect for a Linux desktop beginner because when you Google how to do something you probably won't find things specific to Bazzite. So then you Google Fedora Silverblue (what Bazzite is based on) which has way less tutorials and forum questions and answers than plain Fedora or Ubuntu or Arch"

My wife's gaming PC is in Ubuntu, works the most flawlessly of any of the Linux machines in our house. All mine are on Fedora KDE and while they take more tinkering than Ubuntu they all still work great. No trouble gaming on any of them so long as the drivers are installed correctly

I would start with Mint or Ubuntu and once you've learned more about running Linux you can try other distros to find something you like.

It's kind of a meme to recommend Bazzite for Linux gaming builds right now and there are plenty of people happy using it but idk if it would be where I start distro hopping from

One thing that I did while searching for my preferred distro was buy a handful of 250 gb SSDs. When I wanted to try a new distro, rather than reformatting my current OS to start over I would just swap out the boot drive with one of my blank SSDs and install to that while evaluating the distro. That way if I didn't like the new one or something got botched I could just swap in my old but still functional boot drive back in to the computer without having to reinstall and start from scratch again

Do you need a special version of Linux to game? No. You can install the same drivers and most of the same packages on just about any distro. Steam, Proton, whatever you are going to use to game, it will work on any of the common distros

I use Mint Cinnamon with Wayland. It's absolutely smooth, at least on my hardware. What's your GPU? Some brands are better for Linux than others.

CachyOS!

If you only care about gaming bazzite is probably the simpler option. That said if you play games that don't work on linux then you'll have to let Microsoft own your PC.

If you want Linux than bazzite is great. If you want windows then Windows 10 LTSC IoT.

Bazzite Linux.

For gaming distros latest updates are better as you want all new features and fixes early, but not rolling distros that may constantly break things. For me and a lot others, Fedora is the sweet spot. But in Fedora some tweaks are recommended after installing.

For out of the box gaming experience, Bazzite or Nobara will be a better option as they ship with all the tweaks already made and with all the software required to play games on linux.

Also you may look around here before making a move if you like