If you like Ubuntu but don't like the direction it's going, you can try Mint. It's Ubuntu, but with the bad decisions reversed. Or use LMDE, which is Mint but Debian based.

It doesn't really matter what distro you go with, just don't go with something like Debian Stable because of how old their packages are. You don't need a rolling release system, but you also don't want something too old because of performance reasons.

I game on Arch, works great. Flatpak Steam, X11. 👍

Pop OS works great for me. It's Ubuntu minus snaps and imo some of the rough edges

I've been using Nobara for some time now, and I've been successfully able to play on Nvidia & Wayland, so that's quite a feat in itself. Also, everything is setup at install time, so you don't have to setup many things yourself.

Nobara is specifically customized for gaming, created by Glorious Eggroll (from Proton-GE) himself, with specific packages which he tells you not to install as flatpak so you don't lose the optimizations he made.

Debian is exactly pike Ubuntu, with all bullshit ~~removed~~ never added

Endevour os for me. No issues on kde nvidia and wayland, pretty straightforward installation. If I were you I'd do some distro hopping in the new PC. I'd try one of those ublue images, then nobara then endevour and see what you prefer.

Fedora Atomic, especially Bazzite.

Bazzite is a project of uBlue, which is Fedora Silverblue with a lot of gaming stuff on top, similar to Nobara or the tweaks on the Steam Deck.

It has the same big advantage of every other immutable distro, that you don't have to manage your system yourself. It updates without you noticing, will never break, you can easily roll back if something doesn't work as intended, and so on.

The cool thing is, that you can just rebase to another atomic variant if you don't like it, or when you realize, that every gaming distro is just as capable for gaming as every other conventional distro too.

I'm currently struggling with Nobara and the growing amount of bugs with each new kernel update.

Otherwise I would have recommended that one, since it offers some great convenient features, like a graphical management tool for all sorts of Wine versions, which can be installed in parallel. The kernel supports fsync and is tuned for low latency. Game performance is decent and I also got all my games and launchers (native Linux and also Wine) working.

For the audio part, there is pipewire, which works like a charm. There is also a compatible flatpack for DSP/equalizer which I couldn't find it on Ubuntu's snap store: JamesDSP. Now, after some tuning, my rather flat-sounding headphones sound do super boomy.

I use Arch + Gnome with VRR patches on my main PC.

It find it actually easier to use than e.g. fedora or ubuntu due to better documentation and way more available packages in the repos... With many, many more packages being in AUR!

By installing all the stuff commonly found on other distros (and which many consider bloat), you'll get basically the same thing as, well, any other distro. I have all the "bloat" like NetworkManager, Gnome, etc. which is known to work together very well and which tries to be smart and auto-configure a lot of stuff. Bloat it may be, but I am lazy~

Personally, I think it's better to stick to upstream distros whenever possible. For example Nobra, which is being recommended in this thread quite a lot, is maintained by a single person. In reality, it's not much more than regular Fedora with a couple of tweaks and optimizations. Vast majority of those one could do themselves on the upstream distro and avoid being dependent that one person. It is a single point of failure. after all.

Get the Garuda gaming edition and the only real learning curve is apt vs pacman.

Fedora or Nobara if you're lazy are a good option. If an immutable variant appeals, I have a good time on Kinoite. There is a gaming centric ublue version now too IIRC

Mint is based on Ubuntu, removing corporate shinanigans.

Realistically just use what you prefer. The differences between distros, even when it comes to performance, are very small when it comes to gaming. The most important things IMO are good Wayland support, stability, and consistent updates.

I moved from Kubuntu to Endeavor (Arch-based) and was also afraid of bleeding edge stuff breaking all the time. I gotta say I was pleasantly surprised by how stable it is. The only couple issues I had was 1 bad kernel version and vmware update. I learned how to roll back and avoid upgrading these 2 packages for a couple weeks until the new versions of both fixed everything. I was also reluctant to learn a new package manager since I already know apt, but yay is arguably easier to use than apt. My gaming has been great, no issues.

I always recommend Linux Mint Debian edition. I don't use it, but I've had friends who've had good luck with it. Straight Debian is a great choice as well. If packages aren't new enough, you can always use testing and keep a really stable experience.

It honestly doesn't matter much which you pick unless you're using the absolute latest hardware or something. I personally use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, which has worked really well for me. I don't recommend it because there just isn't as much help available online specific to the OS, so I tend to recommend more mainstream distros. I used Arch for a few years before I switched, and Tumbleweed feels pretty much the same, but with less fiddling.

Anyway, regardless of what you pick, feel free to come back and ask questions. Most problems have similar solutions regardless of distro because Linux is Linux, so please don't hesitate to ask.

Garuda or Chimera, depending on what you want, exactly.

Personally, I really like Garuda Linux and CachyOS for Gaming. You can also check out ChimeraOS or uBlue Bazzite if you want something closer to the Steam Deck.

Linux Mint Debian Edition and Fedora are some general recommendations of mine. Nobara is a fork of Fedora optimized for Gaming.