Nobara has been an absolute pleasure and “works out of the box” experience. Mainly due to having things preinstalled or prompting for installation of gaming dependencies and software up front.

My “get into Linux gaming” distro was Pop. Solid distro tho and having isos depending on your hardware is super helpful and cuts down on a lot of issues you may encounter with other distros. You can’t go wrong either way. If you are looking for a “do it for me/minimal tinkering and installing” go for Nobara. If you are looking to “possibly tinker/install a bit more up front” go for Pop.

Edit: Forgot to mention my specs are somewhat the same as your. i5 with 16gbs of RAM, 1080ti and 1tb ssd. Both Pop and Nobara run smoothly with heavy games like Cyberpunk as an example.

I'm rocking a similar setup and running arch (btw) with kde, 0 issues so far. It feels snappy and I can even game on it.

holoiso is great for a gaming focused distro, essentially the steam deck os but you can install on most devices, but may not play so great with Nvidia cards.

geruda Linux is an arch based distro that is built with gaming in mind and has many flavors of desktop environments to choose from.

I just went through this decision. I landed on Garuda with Nobara a close second. I was coming from Manjaro which was almost completely stable for the last 3.5 yrs. I was only moving because I picked up a new SSD and wanted to see what else was out there.

I chose Garuda not because of the better gaming or perf, but for the preconfigured BTRFS with auto snapshots on upgrade and the presence of a distributed team reduces the "bus factor" problem that Nobara has for future updates and support.

I've been caught out a few times from upgrades on rolling distributions, so the simplified approach to rollbacks is greatly appreciated.

Now for the caveats:

You won't get Wayland with Garuda and Nvidia by default (at least with their "stock" dr460gonized edition on KDE). And if you have more than one screen, I'd say that's probably for the best right now (especially if they vary in resolution, refresh rate, or orientation).

I've found that there's a few little polish things that leave me a bit wanting, but they're by no means deal breakers: one of my USB hubs won't reinitialize after waking from suspend (which worked just fine in Manjaro) and color codes (but not full escape sequences) are printed in terminal applications (eg man journalctl prints 1mDescription0m and the like). They're both probably issues with the Garuda customizations, so I figure debugging them will help me understand things a bit better.

If you're willing/able to hop between distro for a bit, I'd suggest trying at least a couple on for size and seeing how they fit you!

OK so now I'm thinking Garuda vs Nobara :🤔. How do I do a poll lol. Thanks for the feedback btw's.

I have been using Pop-os for a while now. I want to try and switch to arch but i just cant figure it out lol. I really like the feel of pop os tho. I dont use a dock, only the top bar and tiling function and it works great out of the box without having to install tiling window managers and stuff.

Also i'm on a laptop and the battery power manager of pop os works great.

Anyways, pop os has been great for me :D

I guess it depends on what you want.

I'd go with something with a lot of support like Ubuntu if you're new to Linux.

Personally, I feel like any distro works for gaming these days, especially since you have an Nvidia card and don't need to stay super up to date with kernel and Mesa. My advice is to go with whatever distro suits your daily needs, not just gaming. As long as it isn't some super stable enterprise-centric distro like RHEL or Debian stable, you'll be fine.

Whhhhhhy!!! I finally installed Nobara, why did everything go fine had wifi. After updating and restart, wifi doesn't work. I tried looking around can't find anything. I have a usb netgear wifi adapter. It's so annoying because it works before updating. I tried 3x, I'm still new to linux.

Why do you want to switch if everything is working out for you with pop-os?