For gaming, Bazzite is the best, most hands off, set and forget distro I have tried. I would really recommend Bazzite.

Not sure if it runs Unreal Engine 5, but it has Lutris installed and configured by default, so if it is as other commenters claim, you should be good.

It also has Steam amd Heroic launcher pre-installed, so everything is just there ready to play.

CachyOS has been very good for me for a similar purpose

I used Lutris for anything Windows related that needs installers, etc. You can run that on pretty much anything.

As far as distros go it depends on how hands off you want it to be. If you want a set it and forget it distro I'd go with Fedora or Ubuntu.

If you want something more bleeding edge and customisable I'd go with EndeavourOS, which is basically Arch on rails.

Bazzite and CachyOS are most often recommended gaming distros. ~~Both are immutable~~ Bazzite is immutable. Bazzite is based on Fedora and CachyOS is based on Arch.

Unreal Engine for Linux is a thing so that shouldn’t be a problem.

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/linux-development-quickstart-for-unreal-engine

The Unreal Engine for Linux page indicates that they offer pre-compiled builds for Ubuntu 22.04.

It's possible that those pre-compiled builds might work on Linux Mint, since Mint is based on Ubuntu. I would probably try this before committing to the officially supported Ubuntu version, both because it's nice to have a newer distro and because Mint has a good track record of avoiding Ubuntuisms that are not generally well received (e.g. Snap).

If you don't mind some extra work, you can apparently build Unreal for other linux distros. See here:
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/linux-development-quickstart-for-unreal-engine

there's basically two types of dudes (gender not inferred): the ones that faced with a problem go "hmm, that's interesting. let's try..." regardless if it's a lazy afternoon or they're under heavy artillery fire... and then there are those that invariably go "oh what the fuck now!?"

if you're in the latter camp, you have one option and that's Ubuntu. for an experienced user it does suck in some ways, but it "just works" in so many others. you will have ample challenges making the transition and you don't need additional ones.

when you've been around the block a few times, survived a crash or two, know what's what and have at least a passable understanding of the OS, then you can travel farther and explore options, as your switching costs to something like Fedora WS are essentially zero and 99% of what you learned applies.

but, right now, you can stop looking - this is your only option.

If you like the most up to date software but an wasy setup I generally recommend openSUSE Tumbleweed. Its easy to manage, gets the newest software, well supported, and has worked great for boty gaming and hobbiest level programming. Been using it for almost a year eith zero issues.

If you are looking for something more gaming focused and kind of just ready right out of the box, Bazzite is a good call. Its atomic so hard to break, big community so lots of support, and has all the necessary software installed.

when I was in uni like 5 years ago I put arch on the school provided laptop. Not saying to use arch but iirc I had to compile ue4 for Linux because a pre compiled binary wasn’t available. It had issues compared to windows.

If you want to know more about Linux, I recommend Arch Linux. Despite how hard it is said to be, the installation is actually pretty easy as long as you can read the installation wiki. You can apply the knowledge of the arch wiki to many distros, so if you don't want to use Arch Linux, make sure to keep the arch wiki in mind.

If you want one that just works out of the box, I generally recommend Fedora KDE Plasma edition. If you want an immutable one (one that you can't easily break), Fedora Kinoite (this also comes with the KDE Plasma DE).

I personally use Nobara for gaming and streaming. I don't remember why I ended up going with Nobara over Bazzite, but I love it!

Bazzite for gaming, but you will only get a cursory glance at Linux as it's locked down for the most part. Avoid Ubuntu like the plague, go for something like Mint (based on but not the same as Ubuntu) if you want to get an easy Linux experience to learn more. If you like doing it the hard way (easier nowadays) go for something like Arch or Gentoo where you get all the controls you might want over your system. I myself have used Debian for years without issue. Fedora (which Bazzite is based off of) is a decent enough distro as well. You can get a better insight in what you could go for by using https://distrochooser.de/

I tinkered a bit with linux before and dual-booted for about 3 months before I switched entirely to linux about a year ago now. I used this "grace period" to get more familiar, set up everything like i wanted it, and just tested some stuff.

After using Mint before I settled for EndeavourOS. It's based on Arch. As a rolling release OS I find it interesting for gaming and getting recent updates that are not entirely bleeding edge. There were some learning and even issues in the beginning concerning nvidia GPUs but I didn't have any major issues for months now. The only major issue I had was cause by my own stupidity but also could be fixed using chroot.