If you primarily game using Steam then it's easier than ever on most popular distros. Biggest hassle is likely still GPU drivers. I've never had any issues there but depending on what card you have you may be better off with either proprietary or FOSS drivers depending on what your distro of choice likes to provide by default. After that most games tend to just work, a handful may require you to pick a beta version of proton or something.

If you want to try it and don't want to do a lot of tinkering check out PopOS. It's probably the friendliest distro for gaming out of the box.

The main setup went smooth. I can recommend nobara which is what I used. I tried garuda as well, but it wasn't my style. Personal preference, no hate :).

Most steam games work pretty good ( see protondb ). ( make sure to set your steam settings > compatibility to all games ).

Any game with invasive anti-cheat will likely not work. LoL and valorant come to mind. I think some of the cs2 ones like faceit won't work on Linux. But standard cs2 and competitive work fine.

Battle.net gave me some issues on lutris until I forced it to proton.

Overall I've had a good experience. Sometimes a weird issue if I alt tab ( hots ) that it comes back super tiny. I worked around it by running it windowed fullscreen.

Overall I've no regrets so far. I installed nobara and it's quite user friendly. I've never used a fedora distro before ( more extensive experience with xubuntu/Ubuntu/pop ).

Helldivers 2, heroes of the storm and ff crisis core worked flawlessly.

Hots needs to run full screen ( windowed ) or alt-tab will make the screen tiny for some reason.

So far: no regrets.

When you first play a game it needs to compile the shaders first. So on your initial game there's a few minutes ramp up time. But any next times you start the game should be fine.

Not the original poster, but my experience was fairly smooth. I had minor issues with wifi drivers, and I got a new GPU that had some driver issues because it was pretty recently released (I guess the open source drivers didn’t have time to be updated?). In terms of actual gaming, basically no issues. I mainly use steam and proton has been bliss, I’ve bought multiple games without even checking compatibility, and it just works. To my knowledge there is only one old game where the multiplayer doesn’t work, but everything else has been seamless. Mint cinnamon is what I’m currently running.

I switched over from Win10 to PopOS! about a month ago. It hasn't been 100% painless but it's leaps and bounds better than the last time I tried to switch 5-10 years ago. For reference I'm in an AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU, NVME drives for both the system and game drives, SATA for a data drive, NAS for media. I've only reinstalled once because I broke everything tinkering with different desktop environments, but it was an easy recovery with the install media.

All the correct drivers were installed from the get go. I managed to overwrite my cloud save for Horizon Forbidden West because of an issue mounting my game drive and mapping the correct install location in Steam, but that was 90% on me because I rejected the idea of making a backup copy of the files because "I know what I'm doing". I ended up wiping my game drive entirely and reformatting it as EXT4 and haven't had any problems since - the drive was NTFS before and had a handful of games already installed from Windows.

A couple games require finding the right Proton version to run it, but GE works flawlessly for most things I've tried. Everything has run as fast or faster than in Windows with the exception of WH4K: Darktide. There's some microsecond delay in there somewhere that I couldn't pin down. Didn't seem to be video or network related. It's the kind of thing that I bet I wouldn't notice if it were my first time playing the game, but since I've got a couple hundred hours in it, it is just enough to throw me off and make me feel slightly drunk.

Base Ubuntu with the non snap version of steam has been great. I only play a few games, helldivers, some rouglites, and apex. The thing I miss with windows is HDR and auto HDR. HDR will be added in plasma 6 but I had issues with it on KDE Neon but once it's on a stable build it will be good.