Yes this has been asked and answered a million times I’m sure. There is a plethora of ‘top ten distros for Linux gaming’ lists out there and the majority of posts I can find on That Other Site seem to devolve into “every distro can do games”.
I’m interested in what you are using and your experience doing so. Any gotchas you wished you knew? Anything you tried that didn’t work, or anything that worked unexpectedly well? What would you say if your friend asked this over a few pints down the pub?
I've been using PopOS and Steam installed in Flatpak, as well as native and both have worked really well. Lutris i have installed through flatpak, as otherwise it sometimes gave me issues. This is running really well on my AMD 5950x and 6800XT
Using Manjaro KDE here, as well. Granted, I mostly play Counter-Strike, Risk of Rain 2, Stellaris, and various indie games, but pretty much everything has been very smooth. Very glad to be free of Windows on my main machine, and it hasn't really affected how I use my PC day-to-day.
Using Linux Mint Cinnamon for most things currently, gaming included. I've been dabbling with the gnome DE so I can use Wayland, and it's been nice. However, I'm not as big of the DE and don't have time to tweak things to my preferences so I use it sparingly.
Been using arch, don't have issues. Sometimes it doesn't play nice with dwm, but if I switch to xfce then games run without issue. My current computer has an nvidia gpu, next one will be entirely amd based.
Mint for my desktop, SteamOS on Deck. Both do what I need, and the only issues I've run into since switching have been random things like GOG not having an updated Planescape Torment build that works out of the box. I don't play many online competitive games with like invasive anti-cheat stuff, so I haven't run into a ton of compatibility issues.
I mean...Steam OS on Steam Deck...and probably on PC when they release that. If you mean on PC now, Kubuntu. Because I like KDE and Ubuntu is well-supported.
I'm using Nobara. It's a gaming tweaked Fedora with a bunch of gaming and steaming related software preinstalled and configured. Works well in my experience.
Same, started using it on a pc connected to my tv (for a console like experience, boots straight into gamescope/steam).
Now I also use it on my desktop (replacing Ubuntu).
Honestly, I wouldn't make any specific recommendation. Because when you do, you instantly become most peoples personal support technician, when they can't sort something out.
I'd probably make the general suggestions of Fedora/Silverblue/Kinoite, openSUSE Tumbleweed/Aeon/Kalpa, and maybe Pop!_OS if somebody put a gun to my head. But no recommendations.
The way it was explained to me was Fedora = RHEL Alpha, CentOS Stream = RHEL Beta, RHEL is Stable, then there are downstreams who build against RHEL. Only those who are downstream of REHL are effected by the changes. Both Fedora and Cent are necessary development platforms to support everything that eventually makes it down to RHEL in stable condition. They both depend on RHEL for funding, but RHEL depends on them for testing.
Debian Stable + Backports, with a few customized flatpaks. I don't care that my desktop apps are not bleeding edge. My system always works, and games run great.
I installed Garuda on my main desktop PC and have been absolutely loving it. I'm not a linux expert, this is the first time I've dived in with my main pc on linux only (but I have been "trying" linux every so often for as long as I can remember basically). It is amazing how far Linux has come in just the last few years. It is very close to what I would consider a full replacement mainstream OS. I am on a fully AMD system though, so I can't speak for nvidia issues (but honestly I've been sick of them even under windows for a few years now...).
I run AMD kit (not the latest) and install the KDE desktop, Steam and Crossover.
I choose Debian because its packaged extremely well and I want an OS/Applications to be things that just work.
The only bugs I suffer are Proton issues playing Windows games and the recent steam ui update doesn't seem to work with steam link from a wayland desktop (has to be x11).
I very recently (like last week!) stuck a new drive in my PC to run Pop!_OS, with the aim of switching over from Windows entirely if it pans out. So far I've only tested Steam for games, but it's worked flawlessly for the games I've tried using Proton.
I've had a Steam Deck for some time which convinced me to make the jump. My desktop was my only Windows machine and I'd love to properly switch it to Linux.