It doesn't really matter much, just turn on proton (valve's special windows compatibility software for games) in steam after you've installed it.
You will have to install most of your software through whichever package manager (linuxism for app store) is available in your distro (instead of googling the name of the software, downloading an exe, etc), and you will want to install a program called bottles (the most straightforward IMO) or lutris (more fiddly but more geared toward gamers) which iare frontends for a program called wine, which is the windows compatibility program from which proton was forked. Most games that are not dependent on anti-cheat software will run just fine in either proton or wine.
You can also add non-steam softwares to steam and it will try to run them through proton, and they will show up in your steam library with everything else.
You can't go wrong with either a Fedora spin (besides i3 which is pretty advanced) , or Linux Mint if you're looking for something familiar to a windows user. Really pretty much any distro is fine or at least workable.
The best one for gaming I can recomend is Garuda gaming editon, it's sick nasty feels like mac osx and has a bunch of kernal updates to make your hardware preform good.
As raven said, it shouldn't matter much, and WINE/proton will do most of the work.
But I'd recommend something Debian-based, and specifically Ubuntu-based, because those are the most popular flavors, and thus the most likely to get proper testing. For reference, raven's rec of Mint is Ubuntu-based. Fedora is the second most common, so you're still likely to find good support. Arch or Gentoo are a lot more likely to require fiddling around to make things work, but honestly if you're installing one of those it's probably because you enjoy that sort of thing.
If you're buying hardware, AMD graphics cards have better Linux support in general, but Nvidia works well if you install the proprietary drivers (which is usually an extra couple of checkboxes on most distros).
Echoing the "it doesn't really matter" answers, but PopOS might be the best if you just want something that will install and go. They also tend to have very good built-in Nvidia support without having to dive into the command line or installing extra packages if that's a concern.
What is the best Linux distro for g*mers? I'm making the switch.
It doesn't really matter much, just turn on proton (valve's special windows compatibility software for games) in steam after you've installed it.
You will have to install most of your software through whichever package manager (linuxism for app store) is available in your distro (instead of googling the name of the software, downloading an exe, etc), and you will want to install a program called bottles (the most straightforward IMO) or lutris (more fiddly but more geared toward gamers) which iare frontends for a program called wine, which is the windows compatibility program from which proton was forked. Most games that are not dependent on anti-cheat software will run just fine in either proton or wine.
You can also add non-steam softwares to steam and it will try to run them through proton, and they will show up in your steam library with everything else.
You can't go wrong with either a Fedora spin (besides i3 which is pretty advanced) , or Linux Mint if you're looking for something familiar to a windows user. Really pretty much any distro is fine or at least workable.
https://garudalinux.org/downloads.html
The best one for gaming I can recomend is Garuda gaming editon, it's sick nasty feels like mac osx and has a bunch of kernal updates to make your hardware preform good.
As raven said, it shouldn't matter much, and WINE/proton will do most of the work.
But I'd recommend something Debian-based, and specifically Ubuntu-based, because those are the most popular flavors, and thus the most likely to get proper testing. For reference, raven's rec of Mint is Ubuntu-based. Fedora is the second most common, so you're still likely to find good support. Arch or Gentoo are a lot more likely to require fiddling around to make things work, but honestly if you're installing one of those it's probably because you enjoy that sort of thing.
If you're buying hardware, AMD graphics cards have better Linux support in general, but Nvidia works well if you install the proprietary drivers (which is usually an extra couple of checkboxes on most distros).
Echoing the "it doesn't really matter" answers, but PopOS might be the best if you just want something that will install and go. They also tend to have very good built-in Nvidia support without having to dive into the command line or installing extra packages if that's a concern.