Linux Gaming

It's an excellent first choice if you are a bit of a noob on Linux and are primarily or even moderately interested in gaming. I tried many Linux distros in the past, but bazzite was the one where I finally settled into Linux long term. I've been on Linux for nearly 4 years now and I'm finally getting my first Linux phone. There are many other great OSes of course but they often don't include the proprietary drivers needed to get good gaming performance on Nvidia, and they don't come with the whole environment set up for gaming out of the box.

Other cool options are, Alpine, for a really tiny Linux system with a light c lib, Debian for a really simple Linux system, cachey which can give you a few percentage points more performance which could be useful in certain contexts like heavy data processing or gaming on a potato, Ubuntu if you like their stuff which is meant to be a bit more user friendly. Mint is supposed to be more familiar to windows users, but I like bazzite with KDE. I have such a hard time setting Linux up to do what I want, like play games. I love valve in general, they are a single good company in an ocean of shit. Linux in general has a real issue with people making shell apps but not going the extra mile to make a user interface, and bazzite just skips most of this for you to be sort of a windows XP of Linux. My brain just does not work that way. I'm partially deaf so to me the whole world is visual not logical. Shell tools work better for people who are more blind and dream in language and stuff. Language is a bit unintuitive to me, but spatial things are very natural to me. I really suck with shells and setting up environments, but I'm good at modeling and even writing really clever code in a mathematical and geometric sense, just not understanding shell stuff. I always recommend bazzite as a first distro because it mostly just works out of the box without needing to go full hackerman on it for 72 hours only to break it because you don't understand Linux yet.

Doesn't change the fact that you will have a great experience from any of these distro when it comes to gaming. Most of the changes in UX come from the Desktop Environment (KDE Plasma, GNOME, Cinnamon, XFCE, etc...). Other difference are packages availablility but beside Steam which is on most distro package you will probably use Flatpaks anyway. Also you should be able to swap distro without loosing files and games.

So beside some minor changes you won't notice much else. If it's your first time on Linux I would suggest you Bazzite (or Mint).

Yep, out of all the "gaming-friendly" distros I've tried (Bazzite, Nobara, Garuda, Pop!_OS, Mint, etc) Cachy has had the best performance and stability by far, and the least amount of weird quirks or bugs. Genuinely, one of the best distro experiences I've had in a long time.

I do work with linux in a professional capacity every day and have been using Arch on and off for over 15 years, though. My perspective is likely a bit different than the average gamer. That said, I don't find myself having to dig into things very much/often with Cachy, unless of course I want to. :p

Not really. You can compare which packages are available and at which version. You can see design philosophies in the default settings. You can see which installer you like most, what default applications are selected. You can test native snapshotting/backup and restore and see which works most intuitively.
Honestly there are a ton of out of the box things that can differ and can make your life easier (or not) especially when you're coming from Windows and aren't familiar with customizing a Linux distribution to your liking.