Any popular distro will work equally good. The downside is that you have a NVIDIA gpu and it doesn’t work with Wayland. Nvidia said they’ll release Wayland support before end of the current year but let’s see.

For the best Nvidia support out of the box you’d probably try Pop_OS! first. But you can just format your biggest usb stick with Ventoy2Disk and just drag and drop any file into it and test the distro in live mode before installing anything until you’ve found your favorite distro. At this point you choose the one which satisfies your eyes most.

There’s also Nobara Linux, which is created and maintained by the Linux gaming legend GloriousEggroll, but it is unclear to me does it provide any benefit over other distros.

As someone who uses Arch as their daily driver: DO NOT use Arch if you’re not already very familiar with the Linux ecosystem. It’s very powerful, but not at all beginner friendly.

The RTX is gonna give you issues, since the Linux kernel doesn’t handle it natively like all your other hardware, so it’s gotta be a distro with good Nvidia support

Linux mint give you great driver support and looks (in my opinion) like windows could if it wasn’t run by an insane greed machine. It largely stays out of your way and delivers a truly boring Linux experience. If you want a heart racing experience you can try arch which will involve significantly more effort.

Like, if you are super into cars and love spending a bunch of time learning how each part works and reading manuals that is approximately what being an arch user is like. If you just want to buy a car and have it do car things you’ll want a boring OS like mint, Ubuntu, or Pop OS.

For Nvidia, your best bet is Pop_OS, as it has the Nvidia drivers prepackaged. I wouldn’t mess with arch for gaming especially if you’re new to Linux - you’d need to do a lot of tweaking to get it right.

I’ve found setting up gaming on Fedora to be easy, but if you want it to be even easier I’ve heard that’s the entire point of Nobara.

Check your games’ compatibilty first on protondb if they’re not specifically made for Linux, so you know what to expect.

If your mind is set for Arch, go for it, it has an installer these days, but consider some other distributions of Linux that are easier for a novice user. Reserve some time to install a few, if you don’t like the first one or it’s not working out then you can just move on to the next.

Stick to the big ones, because you’ll be able to get the most support for then and find the most information about them.

Linux generally works with software repositories that will contain most of the software you’ll ever need. You rarely need to search for software on websites to install manually.

If you like to get the latest versions of software as it is released, consider OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Arch Linux. They are so called rolling releases. They are not tied down to versions, like Windows, but perpetually update their building blocks as time goes on. Your version is always the latest version.

If you like a more traditional approach with stable releases, consider distros such as Ubuntu or Fedora. Twice per year they bring out a new version (with software updates regularly still) but they tend to stick to large point releases of the software they are built on. You can expect things to work as they are until you install the next version of the distro. In this sense stability means that features generally don’t change. You still get security patches nevertheless. If you don’t like to update the entire system every 6 months you can choose to use their “long term support” versions instead. This will feel the most like new Windows versions, only you’ll get to see the rolling distros on newer cooler stuff, “beta-testing” all the things before your distro’s next LTS rolls them out. I’m starting to digress here.

I never bothered with distros that are built around specific niches, like “gaming distros”. If that maintainer stops you’ll need to switch distros anyway.

I can recommend rolling releases, always have the latest version of everything, as far as the maintainers of your distro can keep up (in which case it helps to go with a large well known distro with lots of maintainers).

If you go arch go something like endeavor, vanilla arch is a bit much coming from windows - you have to set basically everything up yourself. People will tell you Nvidia is a bit shit sometimes on Linux and they’re right but my 3090 is fine for the most part, even on Wayland.

Arch is great, but it can be a bit much for someone to jump straight into. It’s definitely gotten easier in the past few years, but there can be quite a bit of optimization to do to bring gaming performance up to (or past) Windows levels.

My recommendation for a newcomer would be Nobara. It’s a version of Fedora heavily customized specifically for gaming, and it’s run by a developer who does a ton of work for the Linux gaming scene (all hail GloriousEggroll).

I’ve been running Nobara, based on Fedora but with a bunch of tweaks specific to gaming. So far so good. I was using Mint but needed a newer kernel to support my (Ed: AMD) graphics card.

Ubuntu LTS

If it works, stay with it and play your games and learn its innards as needed. If it doesn’t, look for something with a more recent graphics stack. NVIDIA 3050 is fairly mature already and should have no issues slapping with the latest drivers coming with Ubuntu (available for installation after you install Ubuntu).

What SteamOS uses is largely irrelevant to the end user as Valve likely uses it as a base to build and test the versions of SteamOS that make it out. What ships out is likely not the same as running the latest Arch. Kinda like using AOSP because Samsung uses AOSP to build their Android OS. They both share AOSP but they’re not the same.

Linux Mint is what I use and have no issues with my 3070.

Chimera OS might be something you can look into however I have not used it

Pop OS is also great for nvidia support

I was in that same boat about a year ago and I switched to pop_os as a trial for a while before fully committing to it. Works well with Nvidia and steam and I know for sure Dota works on it. I have found that any game that is steam deck verified (or even playable) works on pop_os without issue.

Some rolling release might be good for driver updates, so arc si good for that or manjaro for easier use, but I guess it doesn’t really matter if hardware isn’t the cutting edge and even like mint might do and it might be a bit more stable.

Try Kububtu