At a high level, there is not much of a difference between most distributions. They're all shipping the same software more or less. Zoomed in, there are some differences which may be of interest to you. Things like project governance, frequency of releases (or potentially, a "rolling release"), distribution architecture (how the package manager and package repositories are set up), whether the distribution does custom branding and spit-shine or they distribute software exactly as published by the upstream developers.

Gaming is one of the most common use-cases. You won't have a hard time installing the Nvidia driver or Steam on any distribution for instance, unless it is a distribution designed exclusively to distribute free software which doesn't support things like this for ideological reasons.

but also those who do modern gaming on Linux.

I play just about anything on Gentoo. Native Linux titles, Windows titles through Wine/Proton. Multiple classic systems through emulators ranging from NES to PS3. The main potential sore spot is multiplayer games which require intrusive anti-cheat systems. These typically don't work, but with increasing motivation for publishers to make their games work on Steam Deck, some systems like Easy AntiCheat can work if the publisher chooses (Elden Ring is one example, a Windows game that plays fine in Proton, including multiplayer).

I have a friend who does IT and he swears by the mainline distros like Fedora.

I'm a big fan of Fedora. In general, these 'mainline' distributions (Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora/Red Hat, ArchLinux, Gentoo, etc) form the backbone of the ecosystem. Most of the more boutique distributions are derived from these, applying changes to give them a more suitable out-of-the-box experience for whatever niche they're trying to fill. There's nothing wrong with going either way, but having a general idea of what's going on upstream (e.g. in Ubuntu) can help you understand what's going on in a more niche distribution (e.g. Pop OS, which is based on it).

The upstream distros also typically have very broad hardware support (talking different CPU architectures and instruction sets here, not whether or not your specific USB coffee machine will work). This brings familiarity and uniformity which some people appreciate, like being able to run Debian on anything from a Raspberry Pi to a desktop computer to a high performance server. Something which might not be feasible with Nobara for instance (which is only designed for modern AMD/Intel 64 bit systems afaik).

Nobara works great and is now a rolling district so never have to upgrade. Strongly dislike redhat and things they’ve done and pulseaudio and systemd but gave Nobara a try and it’s a great linux experience with batteries included. Don’t like having to join a discord server for support, but the community there has had answers for the rare time a Proton/Nobara issue has come up.

Bazzite as the atomic gaming district also based on fedora is nice, installed it on a laptop for more portable gaming than the Nobara desktop and it’s been fun. If used to non-atomic linux there’s a slight learning curve with how a few things are done but have stuck with it a while after district-hopping on the notebook several times. Had compatibility issues with hardware/software trying Mint and such on that device and Bazzite just worked out of the box on the weird hardware so a great first impression but YMMV.

PikaOS is the Debian-based version of Nobara and the projects have a lot of crossover. Will likely be the next distro to try, saw the others first and they haven’t given a reason to switch or want to put up with even the minimal effort of hopping.

CachyOS would be the Arch-based version, but heard of people saying it’s better for desktops and plug-in notebooks because by default the battery life is bad and takes some tweaking after install, so haven’t tried it yet. The kernel mods cachy does are also used in Nobara and PikaOS. There’s a custom cachy proton, which can be installed on any distribution.

RegataOS is different, SuSe-based and gaming focused but follow a different path than the above. The installer had issues with specific weird hardware so didn’t get a chance to try it out.

Pop! OS is Ubuntu-based and from all accounts good. The gaming-specific auto-configs of the above aren’t absolutely necessary and many prefer tweaking their own bases. The new wayland-based window manager is impressive so far, but have been sticking with kde/gnome for now. Again, all of that customisable and the commentary is mostly about out-of-the-box stuff.

Out of Nobara v Pop! would go with Nobara but there’s almost no wrong choice and if gaming on steam most games work great out of the box with no fuss. And gaming has been so much better than it was on windows. Haven’t been able to convince gaming friends to switch, yet they constantly complain about games not working on windows without having to fool around with settings for an hour.

Hope it works out as well for you!

bazzite.gg Seems to be your best fit, it's basically all of Valve's SteamOS but community run and organized, it's one of the fastest growing distributions in terms of popularity. The underlying technology is Universal Blue which itself uses the technology spearheaded by Fedora Atomic.

They have a nice download page on their website and loads of community documentation and resources.

Fedora is a genuinely polished distro. I've used the KDE version on three laptops in the past few years and I've been really happy with it. It's got very good hardware compatibility, and modern KDE is a top-tier desktop environment.

other people here are more wise and smarter than me. maybe 2 years ago, i started with mint on a dying laptop just because why not. out of the box, i could email/surf/stream and it was pleasant/fast. so right then i decided to really start shifting my computer use over to linux environments based on how easy that was.

i ordered a framework laptop (i love it) and following the same logic of "big distros = big support community" i went with the Ubuntu long term stable (LTS). setting it up for all my productivity stuff was pretty easy. i haven't really tried gaming on it yet. kinda had this idea i would compartmentalize my computer use over the coming years, instead of trying to do everything on a single frankenstein windoze box that, if it blows up, completely fucks me. especially with how dogshit windows 11 is...

so:

• a laptop for being nominally productive (writing, coding, GIS & map making, researching/reading, creativity/art, etc)
• a very stable miniform/NUC for always on local network services
• a frankenshit machine for gaming that i can just be a reckless dumbass with, because the stakes are low.

so far i am fine with using Ubuntu for the first two. i am still in the process of teasing the various roles and applications apart, standing up services, and expect this process to take the rest of the year to complete, at which point i will wipe windoze off the frankenshit and go with whatever linux distro seems most easily to work with the games im playing.

i might even do some dual boot bullshit on the franken machine if theres some game that i can't emulate around. i think that is an edge case, because the more i use linux to do things, the more i realize how much windows fucking SUCKS. it is so unstable and bloated. i will avoid dual booting until the bitter end, and if i do, i'm gonna put that piece of shit OS on it's own physical drive and try to completely isolate it or something.

I liked Pop OS when it was a modern release, but since they're putting all of their resources into creating their own desktop environment Cosmic, they haven't actually updated their OS significantly since April of 2022.

I use Manjaro for gaming which is pretty user friendly and Arch based like Steam OS. Gaming on Linux means that you're going to be using the windows gaming emulator Proton, developed by Steam. While Proton works well on pretty much any distribution you'd think to use, I think it works a bit better on Arch distributions because they're of the same family as the OS that Proton was designed for (Steam OS).

It's also pretty easy to install proprietary Nvidia drivers on Manjaro.

Either way, you should also install:

https://davidotek.github.io/protonup-qt/

As it is a very easy user interface that allows you to install alternate versions of Proton that may work better.

You're also going to want to bookmark:

https://www.protondb.com/

As that is the backbone of troubleshooting gaming on Linux.

Welcome to the Linux community!

I have never had problems with Mint for gaming and watching funny cat videos.