If you have an AMD GPU: Pretty much any distro that would come up in any “best linux distro of 2023” video.
If you have an nVidia GPU: Ubuntu or Linux Mint (or probably any debian based distro?). You are going to want to make sure you use the proprietary drivers from nVidia, not the nouveau drivers. I suggest Ubuntu and Mint because they have a nice GUI to handle this and you don’t have to run any extra steps. If you don’t mind a bit more work, Fedora and its derivatives is really seamless and, honestly, seems less likely to break whenever you do update those drivers.
If you have an Intel GPU: I am so sorry.
In all cases? You are probably playing most of your games through Steam and Proton. So Steam itself handles almost all issues outside of drivers. There are ideological (and, to a limited degree, technical) reasons to prefer one distro over another. But Steam/Proton really makes most of that irrelevant for gaming use. If you have other uses (beyond browsing the internet and whatever) then you may need to do more research. But, for gaming, your big issue is the proprietary drivers (if you need them).
I have ran the flatpak version for a long time without any issues for games from Steam. How ever if you want to “add none Steam games to Steam” that are also flatpaks you need to add more permissions to the sandbox. You might want to do this in certain cases for example you want to utilize Steam Input for a flatpak game/emulator for better controller support.
IDK, try it and find out? I run it native and haven’t had any issues, and my main concern running it in a FlatPak would be access to system devices like controllers and whatnot. If I ever run into issues, I’ll probably give the FlatPak a shot, but I don’t have a good reason to at the moment.
Sparse for the (two decade old) i915 driver is fine if you only need x86-64 support which would probably be most of us. Other architectures that could use the new Xe driver for DG2 (Alchemist) still wont have HUC (“for AVC/HEVC/VP9/AV1 low power encoding bitrate control, including CBR, VBR, etc encoding”) right? gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/xe/kernel/-/…/234
Intel kinda backed itself into a smelly corner with its consumer GPU card debut. A year in and it’s still quite a mess.
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