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 installed Garuda on my main desktop PC and have been absolutely loving it. I'm not a linux expert, this is the first time I've dived in with my main pc on linux only (but I have been "trying" linux every so often for as long as I can remember basically). It is amazing how far Linux has come in just the last few years. It is very close to what I would consider a full replacement mainstream OS. I am on a fully AMD system though, so I can't speak for nvidia issues (but honestly I've been sick of them even under windows for a few years now...).
Been using arch, don't have issues. Sometimes it doesn't play nice with dwm, but if I switch to xfce then games run without issue. My current computer has an nvidia gpu, next one will be entirely amd based.
Not really. If I do it's usually because of my weak components. Dwm causes issues sometimes but it's just cause whatever I'm playing doesn't know what to do with a tiling window.
Honestly, I wouldn't make any specific recommendation. Because when you do, you instantly become most peoples personal support technician, when they can't sort something out.
I'd probably make the general suggestions of Fedora/Silverblue/Kinoite, openSUSE Tumbleweed/Aeon/Kalpa, and maybe Pop!_OS if somebody put a gun to my head. But no recommendations.
Using Manjaro KDE here, as well. Granted, I mostly play Counter-Strike, Risk of Rain 2, Stellaris, and various indie games, but pretty much everything has been very smooth. Very glad to be free of Windows on my main machine, and it hasn't really affected how I use my PC day-to-day.
It is doable to install an OS onto a flash drive or external drive, but from my experience it was really slow. Just need to make sure to then boot the machine to the USB device. Some machines you might find it difficult to change that in the BIOS.
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).
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