It really depends on the specific games you play; there are some games that are a hard no, which is especially disappointing in specific cases. I don't want to ramble on but the mention of CDs did make me raise an eyebrow :P Def has a learning curve but it's worlds better than when I first tried it.

I will note that it's worth looking (assuming you haven't already) at your library on protondb.com for compatibility information. I gave dual-booting a couple tries over the last 5 years and found it annoying until I made a permanent jump to only Linux 2 years ago.

In the installer, I would recommend setting up a "home partition", which separates system files from user files. **Steam stores games in your user folder,** so you can reinstall OS or hop distros without having to reinstall games. I have an EFI partition, 150 GB on "/", and rest of 2TB on "/home"

You can (almost) always try out distros in a virtual machine to get a handle on them, albeit with poor performance. Also, a lot of distros nowadays use a live version of the operating system for the installation media that you can poke around in before committing to the install.

This could be considered an unpopular choice, though. Arch has a rolling release, so new features come quickly but annoying bugs can come and go quickly as well. I'm interested to see what will happen with the more public release of SteamOS in a few months and what people will think about it.

I've used Garuda and CachyOS on my gaming machine to good effect. They're both based on the Arch distro, though the more and more I use Linux the less I care about having extra things preconfigured on top of Arch.

Also my first Bluesky post! I felt the need to share this somewhere but I didn't feel like wading through Reddit to do so.