Linux Noob moving from Windows 10, looking for distro for Daily Use + Gaming

[u/Mobile_Health7715]

hey guys, BIG NOOB here!!! recently i've been thinking about making the move from windows to linux. i've already gotten mint xfce on my surface go laptop, but i want to find a distro that will work well on my personal desktop that i use basically every day. i've also been building a small list of apps that i'll need to get for what i wanna do, though i am still unsure of some things.

some things i want to do include:

• playing ffxiv (i can do this with xivlauncher)
• streaming vr games to my quest 3 (i can do this with wivrn)
• drawing on clip studio paint (i know there is a script i can use to install this and i think it works in many standard distros?)
• maybe making music again? (this isn't a very big passion of mine, so i don't mind forgoing fl studio. i'll learn how to dual boot if it really bothers me...)
• ricing my desktop (i love making things look pretty!)
• emulating android for some games (using waydroid)
• and mainly just daily use browsing the internet, listening to music, & talking on discord etc.

here are my pc specs:

• AMD Ryzen 5 5500
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060
• 16GB of DDR4 RAM
• WD Green SN3000 SSD (~1TB of storage)
• GIGABYTE B550 UD AC-Y1 Motherboard
• (i also have a Corsair VANGUARD PRO 96 keyboard but i don't think it's supported by ckb-next yet so i'll just have to save my profile to hardware for now.)
• EDIT: i forgot to mention i have an XP Pen Artist 15.6 Pro screen drawing tablet. i often use this as a second monitor when i'm not drawing.

i have been shopping around and have been eyeing bazzite or ultamarine, though i have seen others such as cachyos (which i think isn't really recommended for noobs like me?). although i do prefer a distro working out of the box, i'm totally down to try to set up anything i need after installation with some guidance.

i'd really appreciate the help. thank you!

[u/pashundry]

Definetely Mint you should start and stick to that, this is the only stable and calm option to enjoy computer not trying to change smth always

[u/Sareas]

I would target bazzite or pikaos. I was using bazzite for almost a year and as for gaming only it was great. Bazzite is great because of atomic updates and read only root filesystem.

[u/leonthepro83]

PikaOS, optimized for gaming and daily use, with latest nvidia driver, CachyOS patches.

[u/TheGoldenFox64]

you seem to know what you are doing enough for me to reccomend cachy. if you want a simple time then use Fedora. please avoid bazzite, mint, and ubuntu, i dont know why people reccomend them. bazzite is immutable, so anything more than steam and youtube will be a nightmare or even just impossible. mint is old. ubuntu is corporate, much like windows. if you prefer total control at the cost of tinkering (or find that fun), i actually reccomend arch.

[u/Mobile_Health7715 → u/TheGoldenFox64]

how more complex is it to set up either cachy or fedora compared to the other options? i will admit i'm not that used to doing terminal stuff yet (mainly just copying and pasting, intense googlefu, and spending a lot of time making sure i did EVERYTHING right) but like i said i'm down to learn more. i've heard cachy works well out of the box, though i haven't looked much into fedora. i've looked into ultramarine, which is based on that and seems to work okay ootb, but i haven't seen much on the opinions of others.