Thanks for the details, I don't play those games. (Clair Obscur is on the list but I was planning on just bumming off a friend's xbox version.)

Your nvidia complaints suddenly make a lot more sense after mentioning Wayland. I've always used X11 and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, with Mate as my desktop environment. It was stable in 2009 when I built my first gaming desktop and it's stable in 2025 with my newer one. My main desktop distro has been Gentoo, with my current CPU a Ryzen 9 5900X and a 4090 GPU. (Upgraded from a 1080 Ti. Prior to that on my old machine I had a 1050 Ti and prior to that an AMD Radeon 7950 that worked great up until AMD started messing with their drivers and trying to be more "open" (I hope they eventually got manual fan control back in).)

Besides my Steam Deck I also sometimes have played some games on an older travel laptop (ThinkPad T470p with an older i7 and an nvidia 940MX) running Mint, also with X11 and Mate. Again though I didn't have any real issues apart from having a weak CPU/GPU. (Tekken 7 on fairly low settings and resolution is about the best it can do, I've had better experiences remoting to my home PC with steam remote play or sunshine/moonlight.)

The shader recompilations after a driver update or what have you suck, but I don't think I've had them take nearly 15 minutes before. I've been tempted to turn it off / skip it since in theory it doesn't matter so much anymore for reducing stutters, and Windows is essentially that already (though I still hear complaints all the time from Windows gamers about shader compilation stutters) but I haven't really experimented. This is something that somewhat rewards continuous usage at least, because even if there are games I play that would take that long and I just haven't noticed, it's easy to not notice because the system's on most of the time and Steam can do that in the background as needed before I decide I want to play the game.

I've yet to try one of the "gaming distros" like Bazzite but their marketing often rubs me the wrong way. e.g. they brag about HDR support but I'm very skeptical of that working well or at all for those with nvidia GPUs. I do technically have an OLED 1000 nit HDR monitor but I don't make use of HDR in Linux, that is I guess a downside but when I tried experimenting on Windows when I got it I could barely tell the difference so whatever. In theory gamescope can kinda get HDR working now (as of this year) even with nvidia, at least for playing video files, but I never got it working for games. I have been experimenting with gamescope more but without HDR just to have a more isolated display compositor. Some older games especially don't tolerate alt-tabbing out of full screen and tabbing back in, but with gamescope that problem goes away.

Thanks for your details.

Yes, I must mention that I briefly had a Steam Deck, and it all worked very well. But the issue is with NVIDIA. And my system is not mainly for gaming, so I’m stuck with NVIDIA and I’m Linux is lagging - a lot - when compared to windows.