I’d add my ballot in to recommend Mint or Pop! for someone who wants to game. Newer WINE and Proton versions have made gaming so very nice on Linux. Cinnamon, Mate, and XFCE environments are what I’d recommend for your graphical shell. Cinnamon is kinda Mint’s flagship DE. I’d recommend it for anyone new to Linux or even new to computers in general.
I spent many, many years administering Suse and RHEL systems for work. I found that while I was more comfortable with configuring Red Hat/Fedora-style systems from a terminal/shell-only POV, Mint+Cinnamon were what made Desktop Linux work for me when I realized I absolutely was not going from Win 7 to Win 10. I feel like it’s only gotten better since.
I currently use Endeavour + Cinnamon, but Endeavour is Arch-based, and more for tinkering with than ‘Install and it just werks’ the way Mint or Pop! are.