Linux Gaming

Pop_OS is good, I've been using it for a bit on my laptop. On my main gaming computer, I have been using Nobara for over a year and it's been great. Very stable, only a few small bugs. Games run great on it and it's optimized for gaming specifically. It's part of the Fedora family and developed by the same person who created the Glorius Eggroll version of Proton for Linux.

If you want to stick with something more fully mainstream, then Fedora Vanilla is fantastic also. Just know that the default Wayland desktop will be a little buggy depending on the game/app. I still use X11 personally and will stick with it for another year or so while Wayland gets a bit more ironed out.

Overall, you won't go wrong with Pop_OS or Fedora for mainstream Distros. If you want a little more freedom and customization, go with Fedora and their Plasma desktop version. If you want something a little more power-user but still very friendly and slightly more optimized for pure gaming, Nobara with the Plasma desktop.

If you want total no muss/fuss vanilla, plug n' play, go with Pop_OS.

Links for you:

Fedora KDE Plasma - https://spins.fedoraproject.org/kde/ Nobara All versions - https://nobaraproject.org/download-nobara/ Pop_OS - You already know it lol.

Good luck and welcome back to the full Linux experience!

I was using Linux Mint when I made the switch and it was great cause everything was just working, no tinkering needed. I want to mention https://nobaraproject.org/ though, cause it's a modified Fedora version that works very well for gaming too.

I'd recommend going back to PopOS first as that has worked well for you before. If you want to, you can always distro hop later. PopOS is still a very good distro and, in my opinion, having a smooth and sustainable transition back from Windows is more important than trying out new distros right now.

I've been using Pop for the best part of two years now, I love it. I've tried switching away, I went to Nobara for a bit, but I've always ended back up on Pop. If you didnt want to touch the terminal, you would never have to.

I use Endeavour. It's not necessarily easy and not necessarily hard but there's a Calamares installer and the website has really good instructional articles and forums. Comes with Dracut now which is super fast compared to mkinitcpio. Everything runs great for me and I have similar hardware (same GPU, AMD 7800X3D proc). Tbh I would just recommend rolling release for gaming.

I don't think there's a "best" but PopOS sure is one of the recommended ones. You might also find some answers in this post: https://lemmy.ml/post/1130762

Maybe this is a dumb question, but why not install SteamOS?

endeavourOS! It’s pretty much Archlinux with a gui installer and some helpful things for new users. I recently installed it on a spare drive on my gaming PC with AMD/nvidia and everything just worked after installing steam.

Heads-up, Valorant won't work on Linux; Riot is borderline hostile to attempts to use Linux for their games. Plenty of other games work great on most distros, but not Val.

I usually recommend linux mint for it's windows like aesthetic

Got a NVIDIA 3080

popOS has an ISO that comes with nvidia drivers but linux mint has a driver manager

my [...] streaming setup

OBS works on GNU/Linux

popOS has a lot of features/bloat and looks fairly different from windows. If you chose PopOS update your system before installing anything so the package manager doesn't uninstall your desktop environment

PopOS is shit. Use anything else.