Potentially a somewhat unsatisfying response, but it doesn’t really matter.
Most Linux distros are similarly excellent when it comes to privacy and similarly not-necessarily-excellent for gaming.
Obviously, they do have their nuances, but you’ll only start caring about that, as you understand more of the details.
What’s kind of more important, is the choice of desktop environment. It determines the look and feel of the whole OS.
Distros generally come with a default desktop environment, so your choice of desktop may ultimately play into that.
You can just look at a few videos to determine what desktop environment you like. Popular desktop environments (along with a reasonable distro shipping them):
KDE: very feature-rich, very customizable, rather Windows-like out of the box (Distro: Kubuntu)
Cinnamon: reasonably feature-rich, reasonably customizable, quite Windows-like (Distro: Linux Mint)
GNOME: rather feature-rich, not as customizable, more macOS-like (Distro: Ubuntu)
I read the explanation about this somewhere on the Nobara website, but I can't seem to find it. Someone else was asking about this so I'll just paste what I said there. This is a paraphrase of what I read on the Nobara site. If anyone can find the actual explanation it would be better, but this is how I understood what he said:
The way it was explained to me was Fedora = RHEL Alpha, CentOS Stream = RHEL Beta, RHEL is Stable, then there are downstreams who build against RHEL. Only those who are downstream of REHL are effected by the changes. Both Fedora and Cent are necessary development platforms to support everything that eventually makes it down to RHEL in stable condition. They both depend on RHEL for funding, but RHEL depends on them for testing.
My recommendation is just don't buy into one distro too much. Play around with a few, shit play around with 10. Figure out your desktop environment, your terminal, install your files onto a separate partition you can use from anything.
The big changes between distributions don't really affect every day consumers. They can all run Gnome, KDE, XFCE, bash, fish... They can all run all the software. A few, like your Debian or Fedora based might have a couple better drivers, but even then they'll all be pretty comparable. They all have package managers that are usually some flavor of apt, yum, or Flatpak. If you want to use terminal utilities they all come with coreutils. Every one is good to learn to code.
Play with what you want, abandon it, and play with something else.
Advice from someone who's been daily driving a Linux box since 1998 and who uses it every day professionally.
Distro-hopping is a valid hobby, but it's not for everyone. If you aren't specifically interested in distros and fiddling with packages, hopping around on your "daily driver" can be disruptive. If you just want something that works, there's nothing wrong with figuring out which distros do what you need and using one of those for work and play. If something catastrophic happens to a distro to make it literally unusable, you can worry about that when it happens. There is usually something else which is almost the same. Few people will get much value from hopping between distros which are basically the same, just because the distros are put out by different companies or install different packages by default.
Oh that's totally fair. I guess my point is if you're just looking for something that'll work then that's just about any of them. I'd pick the one with the most results on StackOverflow because it's most likely to have any issues resolved. And even then, to be honest, that's just a habit from 25 years ago when issues were a thing, these days pretty much everything just works.
If you're asking about distro recommendations I guess I expect a distro hopper.
I mean...Steam OS on Steam Deck...and probably on PC when they release that. If you mean on PC now, Kubuntu. Because I like KDE and Ubuntu is well-supported.
Using Linux Mint Cinnamon for most things currently, gaming included. I've been dabbling with the gnome DE so I can use Wayland, and it's been nice. However, I'm not as big of the DE and don't have time to tweak things to my preferences so I use it sparingly.
I'm using Nobara. It's a gaming tweaked Fedora with a bunch of gaming and steaming related software preinstalled and configured. Works well in my experience.
Same, started using it on a pc connected to my tv (for a console like experience, boots straight into gamescope/steam).
Now I also use it on my desktop (replacing Ubuntu).
I think you can simply install a Linux distro on a USB drive. You should use something fast like a USB-C hard drive and you’ll have to think about where to put the boot loader. But if you’re careful, what you have in mind should work.
What sort of tools are you going to use? I make ambient synth music and will often record and edit in Audacity. I use all analog hardware though, so it's different if you're using software. Only music focused distro I've ever heard of is the gentoo one, but I know there's gotta be others.
I never heard of gentoo studio. Im looking into it now and it looks like a decent possible alternative.
I want to run a DAW like Reaper, with multiple midi tracks playing through vst instruments. I had no problem doing that on windows 7 with my 4th gen i7 processor and 16GB of RAM, so my 8th gen processor should be able to handle it. But it's a "power saving" processor that actually benchmarks very close to my old 4th gen, so I do want to keep the OS and desktop environment light.
Edit:
I see gentoo studio isnt listed on distrowatch, but you can get it theough his site.
I learned about gentoo studio through the gentoo wiki. For music production where I use software I typically boot into my separate windows ssd, just because I've had so many head aches when trying to work with linux software and hardware that isn't fully supported. I'd love to do everything in linux, but some daws just don't work. Especially when I've got so much stuff set up already in mpc or guitar rig.
Easiest solution for windows with one pc, in my opinion, is get an external ssd and do windowstousb. I use that, and it works like it's native. Set me back about 100$ for a 1tb ssd. I've played games on it, made music, and other things. Works really well, so I'd suggest that before making a whole separate pc for windows alone.
I've gotten used to adding extra drives in fstab, myself. I do wish adding permanent secondary drives was a more straightforward process though. I understand the Windows approach of making them instantly accessible has security implications, but I feel like that's something distros could implement as an optional setting.
I think little things like this hinder Linux adoption among end users. The purists may cry foul at this idea, but I think there should be more and better GUIs for system management tasks, so users don't have to use the terminal or muck around editing text files as much.
EDIT: Apparently gnome-disk-utility might be a solution if you're looking for something more straightforward than manually editing fstab. I don't know whether it can do permanent mounts or not though.
EDIT2: Turns out gnome-disk-utility can create fstab entries, but it can't remove them if you've used it to delete a partition.
Can gnome-disk-utility set up permanent mounts? I've used it for other things before, but I've never used it to permanently mount a drive. If so, I wish I knew about that sooner.
Yes, if you check the “mount at system startup” checkbox, it’ll update fstab for you. My only problem was when deleting partitions on gnome-disk-utility, it doesn’t automatically delete the fstab entries it previously created. You’ll need to manually clean it up yourself. This might cause mount problem if you delete and recreate the partition with the same mount settings because there are now two fstab entry, where the first entry references partition that no longer exist.
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