@ygathgoch @donthatedontkill Given the troubles I've had, I'm maybe not the best person to offer advice.
However, so far my most seamless gaming experience has been while using Kubuntu. By and large I had no trouble with that. Pure Arch was a shit show for me from top to bottom.
Now my PC is running CachyOS, which is Arch-based, but comes with most drivers and gaming software either pre-installed or in a handy package manager ready to download.
My PC is quite old, so I can't speak for any newer games, but I've been able to play most things in my Steam library without any trouble. Rockstar games are proving an utter shit house under my current setup, but I put a good number of hours into Red Dead Redemption 2 when the PC was running Kubuntu. Damned if I can get it to run under Cachy though. But as I said, my hardware is quite old, so your mileage may vary, as they say. But Horizon Zero Dawn works well enough. Horizon Forbidden West *technically* works, but my CPU is really too old, so I had to patch it. Performance isn't great though.
Don't forget that you can use this site to check over community compatibility/settings left by users. It is such an invaluable resource to see if something you love works, and how well!
It not only covers #SteamDeck but #Linux games (and even Chromebook)
@donthatedontkill I made the switch to Linux a bit more than two years ago, mainly due to Microsoft. I bought a Steam Deck basically when it released and felt it was worth trying, so when Recall was announced it was time for me. I'm running Fedora on a laptop and have tried Fedora, Kubuntu and CachyOS on my "gaming PC". Before that, I've tried around ten or twelve different distros to see what I would prefer. I've found that the choice of distro for the most part isn't too important, what's most important is the different Proton versions. (Although CachyOS has a good wiki, so it might be a good choice in that regard.) As @flwwhtrbt said protondb.com is actually crucial, but be prepared to see some people having some pretty peculiar ideas regarding what launch commands they're recommending. You will need to be a critical reader. Also, if you're planning to use Heroic, Lutris or similar for non-Steam games you need to be prepared for even more reading and "tinkering". Most things work, but there will be things where you need to trial and error your way out of it and read the Heroic/Lutris documentation. There will be a handful of games that need a specific Proton version (also Proton-GE is something you should look into) and future updates may change which one you need to use for a specific game.
Also, if you want to use something "exotic" like HDR on Linux you will need to read a lot of documentation and try to figure quite a few things out. In my experience gaming on Linux is not seamless, it's definitely not plug'n'play, but if you're actually determined to get rid of Windows and willing to dig through documentation you can make it work. I'd say that on average seven or eight out of ten games work on first try without changing anything. YMMV.
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