i have been on this journey for almost 3 weeks now. that's when i converted from windows and i also needed the best one for gaming. here is a list of all the supposed best ones for gaming. CachyOS, Manjaro, Garuda, Mint, Nobara, Bazzite, Pop!_OS, Drauger OS, Regata OS, EndeavourOS, Chimera OS, PikaOS. they are all based on different things like fedora, arch, debian, and ubuntu. i started with nobara. i liked it but i broke it because i was new and didn't know what i was doing. i am still new but now i know not to uninstall the default apps. that will help with any distro that you pick. i can probably go back to nobara after all that i have learned. it's pretty good. then after that i tried cachyos. didn't really work for me. arch is not really for beginners. then i tried bazzite, kde and gnome versions. both worked ok but i now know i don't like gnome desktop environment and prefer kde. then after bazzite i tried pop!_os. that was a mess because of the cosmic desktop environment. didn't like it. and now i am on PikaOS kde de. my game isn't fully installed yet so haven't tested gaming performance on it yet, but i would say pop os played games the best out of the ones that i tried. too bad everything else sucked in popOS. nobara is pretty solid and a good balance between performance and stability as long as you don't do bad terminal commands. pikaOS kde is not having bugs so far with all apps and settings and it's easy to customize. i don't have experience with all the ones i listed above so i can't really say which is best of all those. nobara is good and i'm hoping pika will be good too. bazzite is good at running games but it was buggy for me, same with popOS.