Just to provide a bit of contrast to the very helpful wall of text:
Debian/Ubuntu is fine so long as you allow it to use the closed source nvidia drivers. Ubuntu’s approach to long term stable (?) releases scares people a bit (and there are some ideological thoughts on how debian packages are set up that you either don’t care about or are already religiously opposed to), but… for gaming, pretty much none of that matters. Steam updates itself (or you update via the package manager) and you manage proton via steam or, if you are fancy, ProtonUp-QT. And then… that is it. The other concern tends to be that ubuntu is VERY snap/flatpak heavy these days which is USUALLY good but can get weird in terms of permissions depending on how you set up your file system.
Which kind of gets to the general “religion of linux” as it were. Generally speaking, partition your drive (or, just have multiple drives) and understand you are likely to wipe and reimage your install OS over time. Maybe there is a new distro you want to try and maybe you just managed to completely hose your machine and are now kernel panicking an hour before you leave on a holiday. But also that it takes about 20 minutes to repair a distro or completely change distros and then get all your preferred dependencies and configurations set back up. Whereas Windows… 20 minutes in is around the time Cortana is telling you that you just have to login five more times to start the install.
Same with drivers. If you want to stay as pure as Danny DeVito crawling on the floor? Go with AMD. They have MUCH better support for open source drivers (right now…). But the nvidia closed source drivers are good and you are already failing at being pure FOSS if you are using steam to buy and play games anyway. And as much as I love AMD’s CPUs… you are still better off price for performance just getting an nvidia one because dlss is that damned good (FSR is a generation or three behind).
But, again: Just experiment. Figure out what distro works for you. I like kubuntu for my client use because Plasma is really nice and things generally “just work” outside of a few really annoying bits where, increasingly, chatgpt lets me avoid having to filter through the angry greybeards on forums myself. And for server use I am usually in either debian or rhel/centos/rocky and that manifests as me getting cranky on a call when I type apt instead of rpm or dnf.
But you can find giant walls of text supporting anything. Hell, there is probably some lunatic out there who still thinks people should use SunOS. The key is to experiment and decide which flavor of crazy you are.
But also? I strongly encourage just keeping a 1 or 2 TB drive for Windows, depending on what you play. You can try dual booting but my general experience is that windows will always find a way to kill your bootloader and you are much better off just mashing del when you boot up to pick which drive to boot into. 99% of my usage is on Linux but I use Windows for gamepass PC, VR (although it may be worth figuring out how to get my WMR working with linux steamvr…), and… updating the firmware on my 8bitdo controller because I can’t be bothered to properly expose the usb device in wine. nvme drives are dirt cheap and most motherboards have at least two slots.