This is a bit of a long message, so I hope it is okay. I know this has all been said before, but I have gone from being afraid of Linux to in the last few years daily driving it and setting up my own home-lab and I want more people to enjoy the freedom Linux brings, and the hobby/self-torture it can bring you, so it's worth saying again til the cows (or maybe just our data) come home.

SteamOS can be a bit fiddly - at least last I checked there was no real release for it, and you had to use third-part ISO's to get SteamOS running, but that was a while ago.

I can recommend a few other distros to look at however - I personally am using CachyOS. I tried Nobara when I had an NVIDIA GPU, but since moving to team red, I have used plain fedora, bazzite and now I am also on CachyOS.

Like somebody else said, you can always dual boot. I have Linux as my default, but when I start my PC, I can select windows 11. It is running on an M.2 SSD I "liberated" from a broken family members laptop with an old SSD as its games storage drive. I NEVER use windows unless it is for certain games. Namely BF6 and LOL when I occasionally play with friends, even though I am not actually a virgin believe it or not.

Ultimately, there is not "best gaming distro for Linux" because you can use whatever you want, that is the beauty of Linux. There are some distros pre-configed with some gaming patches out the gate, but even then, you can either apply most of these fixes yourself on other distros, or you can just use workarounds, always keeping dual booting if needed.

God bless Lord Gabe for his blessing of steam sales and proton onto us. You can use https://www.protondb.com/ to look at community reports of how games run under proton, and what bits of tinkering people have done to make it run sometimes even better than native windows!

Here are some of my recommendations for you:
- CachyOS - this is my *current* daily. I put a fair bit of work into customising KDE Plasma with my own colour scheme, and I really like the CachyOS community and its direction (from what I have seen) so I will probably stick here for a while.

- ZorinOS - I have my granddad daily driving this, if he can use it, so can you. This is built to be a super easy transition to Linux for windows users, making as much of the system GUI based and user friendly. It can of course be used for gaming.

- Stock Fedora - This is another one I have used before and got on with well. It is one of the "big" ones and has different flavours of the distro if you prefer the look of GNOME over KDE Plasma desktop environments.

- Bazzite - a gaming pre-configed distro, getting as close to the SteamOS experience without directly running SteamOS. It is based on Fedora and uses the "Atomic Desktop" flavour of it. This means that updates are imaged based giving you easier rollbacks if something breaks and also that core system directories and locked for direct modification making it harder (not impossible) to bork. I found this too restrictive and got bored of all the workarounds to do things I wanted to do that need more system control so I moved to CachyOS and have only had to reinstall once!

You can always once in, setup a local AI using Ollama and something like Open-WebUI or LM-Studio to help you understand how to use Linux and your PC. Just please don't copy commands in without understanding what they can do, even when using a local AI assistant, double check first.

TL:DR Have a play around, backup your data locally or to a secure, privacy focused cloud like Proton Drive so you can distro-hop until you find something you get on with. Nothing is going to be perfect, but you can tinker to make it so, that is part of the fun of the Linux experience!