I'm a big Pop!_OS fan. Based on Ubuntu so great for following guides and comparability. But no Snap, Flatpak is installed, the OS looks fantastic and runs smooth and gaming on it has been great.

It's so underrated but it's my favourite OS.

Honestly the best way to find if a distro will work for you is to just give it a go.

Theres this cool project called ventoy where you can load mutiple isos onto one usb drive to use and install diffrent distributions. Its really neat.https://ventoy.net/en/index.html

Using this, take your top 3 choices or so, load em up and take em for a spin. See what you like best.

Someone already mentioned Pop_OS which is a good option. I really like the look of KDE personally and think its nice and modern looking so a distribution like kubuntu like another comment mentioned is also good. Ubuntu is fairly user friendly having used it myself as a new linux user but i just dont like the look of gnome.

Im planning on using Fedora KDE as my main distro moving forward as it seems stable and up to date for the most part.

All that said, it really is just a matter of personal preference. Try out a bunch of stuff and see what you like. Thats what i did until i landed on fedora.

Haven't used it much myself, but Nobara might fit your description. It's optimized for gaming.

Low latency kernel you get on all distros.

Hardware support for GPUs in based on compositor. X11 supports them better but Wayland is faster, both are available on most popular distros and swappable via a logout login.

Modern looks can be done with desktop environments like KDE and Gnome. Both are good, but KDE is more customisable.

If you don't want to compile stuff yourself every now and then then choose Ubuntu or Fedora based distro.

Having the freedom to install anything you want is a fun requirement. If you mean literally anything then Vanilla OS might suit you since you can use all package managers but you get less modern features with it. This gives you 20 year old apps stuff that only works on some fringe dead on. If not that extreme then Ubuntu based is a bit better than Fedora based in those situations.

Ubuntu is nice and all but you'll have to follow a guide to add flatpak support otherwise a very good distro.

So here's a suggestion list from me:

• KDE Neon (Ubuntu based on LTS versions)
• Fedora (Gnome or KDE variants)
• VanillaOS (if edge cases)
• PopOS (New kid on the block. It's just nice)

I recommend downloading whatever interests you and start them up in a VM.

I personally use arch with i3 window manager. Before anyone says anything, no, this isn't another "I use arch btw" gag. It is fast, highly customisable, barebones and in my experience i3-wm works great with games which have fullscreen/windowing issues as it is easy to toggle between full screen and move windows about. For example, Gmod kept sticking in between my two monitors on Ubuntu and wouldn't let me move the window. With i3, you can move containers around with ease. Plus if your arch installation breaks it is almost always your fault. I also have better performance than when I was using Ubuntu.

No issues on Arch here with a 2080 TI. I chose it because Steam based SteamOS on Arch.

I use endeavour os. Is arch made easy, while still being arch. It fills your needs, you can install any DE you like (kde myself) and a zen kernel with basically one command line. Also for nvidia if you go that way you just do "nvidia-inst" and are good to go. Another nice one that checks those boxes is nobara, a fedora spin focused on gaming.

Nobara! It is awesome for gaming and performsnce intensive tasks and beside being an obscure distro is maintained by reputable people (glorious eggroll, proton GE creayor)

endeavourOS kde is gorgeous and by far the most stable and ready-out-of-the-box arch version i've tried.

also the eos-packagelist --install [desktop environment] command lets you install the other endeavourOS themed DEs or WMs just like the distro installer does so you don't have to reinstall or work on themes yourself if you want to change after install.

pipewire is also ready to go and i think it uses some kind of realtime thing, but i'm using the default kernel so i don't know that it's a low latency kernel level thing by default.

games have also been top notch for me, the only tweaking i've done is adding -vulkan launch options to steam games.

overall i highly recommend it. i'm using kde but tried cinnamon, i3, and sway (though community editions like sway are going unsupported soon) and they are all similarly well-themed.

openSUSE Leap with Nvidia drivers works like a charm

I've tried a bunch and found this one to have the best balance of features and quality of life fixes.

Esp, for gaming.

https://kubuntu.org/

Been gaming on Endeavor since April, it rules.

It doesn't matter, they're all pretty much the same.

I use Ublue, I think it's good.

I've been using arch exclusively for years now. Pacman and the wiki are just too good for me to go elsewhere. I've used Gnome and Kde both extensively and I just like Gnome more. Kde just has a lot of jank that doesn't make it feel like a modern system imo. Gnome is a much smoother experience. Both work perfect for gaming though. Just started experimenting with hyprland this week and I've been loving it. It has some weird stuff with running games, but that just might be user error. I have friends who swear by mint too which I haven't seen mentioned in this thread much.

Wouldn't you have an easier time if you swapped out the 3060 for a comparable AMD?