Most NVidia cards work well. Nobody will recommend them because NVidia is known to pull the rug out of your perfectly working card all the time, and being completely aggressive against people trying to make the cards work without by their own.

I have a 3090 ti without any issues

I have a 2080 and an Intel CPU – Linux Mint worked perfectly out of the box.

it works like a charm with my rtx2060 and the new rtx2080

there's several distros with a focus on gaming like steamos and bazzite. I personally use cachyos as it worked right out of the box without installing any drivers.

Linux runs nvidia fine. It can run most games without a problem. Whether or not it can run a game that’s heavily gatekept is another matter altogether.

I’m running a 3060 with CachyOS and no issues. Mint however gave me some problems. Fixable problems, but problems still. CachyOS worked straight out of the box.

AMD is much more reliable and has improved for decades. Nvidia has their proprietary driver and new open source driver. Both work ok, but definitely less good than AMD.

Just make a live boot drive and try it out! Maybe get a little partition setup. I’ve been running Kubuntu for 3 weeks just fine! I am tech savvy though, but most of the things I needed to be savvy at were only because my PC is also my media server. It was less than 1.5 hours to set up gaming and all my window management options and whatnot. And now everything just works.

Just a heads up, running Linux on Apple’s proprietary hardware can get a little complicated. If this is your first foray into Linux, I recommend using a standard PC laptop.

I'm easily in the phase where I'm dropping $20+ on games without even thinking to look what their status is on ProtonDB. Windows is still around for some back-compat stuff and old projects I'm finishing, but I'm good where I am.

That said, on Cachy, does anyone have recommendations for a Calendar app that works with MS? I've tried a few, and a number of them don't work on Cachy.

They're all pretty much the same. If you find a distribution that works with your hardware, it will perform the same as the next one.
The few differences will matter (or not) once you're experienced with the system.

In short, don't worry about it.

Spin up some Linux distro while you wait.

Especially if you're a "power user", you'll have a lot of unlearning to do, might as well get started and go in prepared for a lot of disappointment.

I wouldn't count on Valve for a desktop OS. Their main responsibility is a good user experience on the Deck and Machine, which will be pretty console-like. Desktop mode's good enough for maintenance and modding, but not for vast hardware support.

There are some other general recommendations across Lemmy, but the ones that come up a lot are PopOS, CachyOS, and Bazzite.

He's lying, Jason Momoa killed and ate Henry Cavil as is the custom