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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Try Kububtu

Ubuntu LTS

If it works, stay with it and play your games. Learn its innards as needed.

If it doesn’t, look for something with a more recent graphics stack.

NVIDIA 3000 series is fairly mature line already and should have no issues slapping with the latest drivers coming with Ubuntu. They’re 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 modify, build and specific versions of SteamOS that make it out. What ships 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.

I play CS:GO and Dota 2 among other things on Ubuntu LTS with a 2080 Ti.

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.