So far this is the best answer in here.

Just choose something you can wrap your head around and start from there. No need to jump to anything complicated like Arch linux.

I first started gaming on openSUSE and then moved to Fedora. Can't say I don't have to look around for answers to run some games but I'm more than happy with the experience in general. I play some older games like Deus Ex, Baldur's gate and such, but I also play Cyberpunk 2077, Stray and Marvel's Spider-man Remastered without any real issues.

Also, let's be realistic about it - arm yourself with a bit of patience, because the process of installing games could be as simple as clicking install and then play, but it could also require some tinkering to get some games running smoothly.

The only downside that I've found to Pop!_OS is the default use of Flatpaks. While Flatpaks are generally pretty great, they can sometimes cause odd issues with interactivity with other apps because of their isolated nature. A pretty famous issue is with KeePassXC's Firefox add-on not being able to detect the Flatpak version of KeePassXC, but there are quite a few other notable examples. I also personally like theming my system icons which is a bit of a pain with Flatpaks.

Thank you for the inputs. I have had experience with ubuntu and fedora before (they came free in my old high school computers). But I wasn’t so sure they can game. But maybe this has changed in recent years.

If one is interested in the perspective of using Mint for games:

I have been using Mint for gaming for ~4 years and anything that was broken for me is fixed now. Went straight from Windows 7 to Mint and have had a very pleasant experience. If you're using Steam primarily, there's very little that doesn't simply work out of the box. The rare case that doesn't is generally solveable through ProtonDB, or eventually fixed.

The only shit that doesn't work for the foreseeable future is generally online-only stuff specifically that has invasive anticheat. Big MMOs, Destiny 2, Valorant, that sort of thing. Blizzard games mostly work fine, though have some random temporary issues rarely. But I don't usually play games like that for various reasons, so I do not personally care myself.

Special mention to League of Legends which is the big multiplayer game I do play and works a hell of a lot more consistently than it used to, there's actually a community here on the fediverse if you have issues setting it up, ( !kbin.social/m/leagueoflinux ) but in recent years it should be pretty easy compared to even 2 years ago. Install through lutris and it just works for me now, and it runs measurably smoother.

I wouldn't really recommend using the Epic store, as stuff does not run very consistently and it's awkward and slow to run through lutris. Itch has a native client that works very well for native games, and at least tries to run windows stuff through wine (so-so on if it works, some small first-timer games just aren't very stable ha. Most games work for me.) GOG is a pain in the ass imo and I know that's a controversial opinion, some people like downloading every individual game through the website lmao. I have hundreds of games and this is mostly annoying to me, personally. There's actually a third party doodad for it (minigalaxy) that works fine, but I don't care to try it myself. (A lot of the appeal to GOG for me was their client, not being able to use it just makes it "worse steam" to me.)

If you like indie games (especially those popular enough to have steam pages), singleplayer games, or retro games, it's a great OS. (It's actually superior to run retro games on Mint versus Windows, from my experience, trying to get some of them to run on Windows was an absolute nightmare.)

I have had no drivers issues, didn't really have to go out of my way to "set things up." Though I would recommend having a rig with an AMD gpu. Nvidia is the one you run into more drivers issues with. I did swap to pipewire manually but it's not really necessary. Everything I've stuck in has been serviceable as plug-and-play, though some I've added tweaks to some things for my own tastes over the years.

Sure, but they don't just go installing arch from an arch ISO, they carefully curate an environment with a team of experts to make sure it doesn't break.

That's not the experience you're gonna have gaming on Arch on your gaming desktop.

What manual? cause everytime I look for solutions to a problem with regards to linux, I dont find a manual. I find random posts with a bunch of esoteric commands to copy and paste into terminal with minimal/no explanation of what they do, and a 50/50 chance that it'll either fix the issue, or do nothing because the commands are now depreciated and the post is 12 years old. And when I finally spend 1-3 days of trying to solve it myself with no success, I sigh and tend to make a post about it somewhere, knowing there is a 1/3rd chance I either get a reply like yours, which does nothing helpful. 1/3rd chance of outright hostility, and if i'm lucky.. the 1/3rd chance someone helpful will reply and provide help in a way I can understand.

Maybe if a manual existed that someone with no linux knowledge could understand and use as a guide to solve their problems, RTFM would be a valid stance, but now it just makes you sound like an ass.

Thanks for mentioning it. Nothing too modern. Fallout 4, Skyrim and Starcraft 2 are my staples but C and C games like Tiberium Wars and older would be nice too. I wouldn’t count on modern games to run perfectly but maybe there’s a chance that older games can?