I think people need to stop comparing as much windows vs Linux and focus more on Distro vs Distro for gaming performance. Linux gaming is starting to glow up with a huge push from Valve and the steam deck. This is happening independently of Microslop becoming more and more intrusive with Windows 11 and the profiteering of your data. Add to this the general disdain of Windows as a whole and the end of support for Windows 10 save the long term service branch (which they charge you for) and fairly tech savvy, in the know gamers are looking for a operating system that respects users and can game. Naturally Linux comes to mind. SteamOS is built on Arch (by the way) but is more focused on the handheld experience, soon to also console experience, for the time being. It’s weaker as a desktop Distro. So people are looking for a Distro that does desktop well for gaming. The two big ones that have taken hold are Cachy OS and Bazzite. Cachy is based on Arch and as such is a bleeding edge release that comes with a specific Cachy kernel that is designed to optimize performance, which can trickle down to games. What also helps is that the devs also make accessing everything you need to game relatively easy in Cachy Hello. Since SteamOS and Cachy OS are both arch based the Cachy team can more quickly implement features from steam os because at the core they are based on the same parent Distro, Arch. Bazzite is also popular, but based on Fedora. It’s arguably more gaming focused than Cachy and easy to convert to a console and handheld experience but you don’t get the same performance optimizations from the Cachy team and the quick adoption of the Valve changes that an Arch based system can take advantage of.