Preface: My history with gaming and Linux
I've been playing computer games for a looong long time. I remember playing the crap out of the Halo CE Trial. Since then I've used numerous operating systems. I've used all the Microsoft OS' from XP all the way until 10, but inbetween that I've used Linux quite a bit.
It started with wanting to get more FPS in Minecraft on my Win7 era laptop. I went with a popular distribution named Zorin OS which worked great! After which I tinkered with other distros. Most recently I've used arch based distros, which while are good most of the time, sometimes newly introduced bugs can cause some pretty bad problems for general use.
Distrobox Era
I originally had a Debian setup that I was going to talk about. Essentially, I had Debian stable with a mainline kernel + cachy patches, with support for cpu scheduler extensions. Then for gaming, I had Bazzite (Arch) from this awesome project called distrobox. It allows you to essentially run a whole distro in a podman container and it works surprisingly well.
Though I had started having issues with VR, while ALVR works mostly without any extra stuff (I have a quest 3); WiVRN requires access to DBUS and I could not figure out how to get that working properly. I did eventually just install steam on Debian and ran WiVRN on the host machine which worked.
Coming full circle
Ultimately I started to feel like I was unecessarily doing too much justs to get my games up and running. Not to mention I had some issues with running EAC games that were installed on an external drive. So I decided to jump ship and distrohop. After some consideration I saw that Pop OS had something in beta called COSMIC, their new wayland desktop environment written from the ground up in rust. Which I was very excited to hear about because right now you pretty much have plasma or GNOME as your de of choice if you wanna go wayland. So I gave pop os a try. My first impressions are very positive. COSMIC is very snappy and I don't feel much input lag/sluggishness as I have experienced on GNOME or Plasma.
However after some messing around I eventually came across some flaws with it. It is missing some important features like changing how the application menu looks, selecting new defaults for file extensions, and then I had some strange interactions with Steam. The toast / notifications would appear on the wrong monitor occasionally. This could be alleviated with putting steam in gamescope and just playing that way but it is not the best solution for everyone. What turned me away was eventually I figured out that the software + hardware combo I have just doesn't work great on POP os since it is based on LTS. A UE5 game that I have played recently wasn't having any issues before but suddenly shadows were broken and certain effects were having artifacting. I realized it was just because of the kernel + mesa combo of pop os. For clarification I use an Intel ARC A770 for my gpu with an AMD CPU.
That has brought me back to where I started. Kinda. I decided to go to Cachy OS as I was already using their kernel patches I thought why not. I tried using COSMIC on there and while there were some fixes to some of the issues I had, there were some things just missing from it. Which I'm not blaming COSMIC for; it is openly in BETA and I would like to see the improvements they make in the future.
Which brings me to my current setup, sway. I used to use i23