I would recommend staying away from Manjaro regardless of your distribution preferences, for a whole range of reasons, some of which are documented here.

When it comes to Nvidia, don’t let people make it look like it’s some kind of an adventure quest with no map markers. Practically any reasonably maintained popular distribution will either have everything installed already, or will give you an Nvidia option during installation. There are still some long-standing issues, but the vast majority of them are either actively being worked on, or just got upstreamed, and it’s up to your distribution to deliver the update.

If you like Debian/Ubuntu based choices, Pop is not my preference, but it is a good distribution. Otherwise, Endeavour has been absolutely excellent. Fedora isn’t necessarily a bad option, but their package management policies will make setting up gaming workflows a pain. Nobara comes with all of that pre-configured, but is otherwise just regular Fedora

Fwiw I started out with PopOS as I had a 1080ti and am still with it having moved to a 7900XTX. No issues with it apart from the Pop Shop being slow which should be remedied by the new Cosmic version

Hi,

I’m going to say that at a high level it doesn’t make much of a difference. Some distros will make claims they have tweaks for gaming but for most players I doubt you’ll notice the difference. Almost all distributions make it easy to get Nvidia drivers working these days so I wouldn’t worry about that.

I’d say to pick the distribution based on other factors, such as update policy (rolling vs stable) or desktop environment you prefer.

I wanted to wait to the end to mention Manjaro has some controversial aspects to it. In terms of how the project handles money and leadership. I’d personally not recommend it but that has nothing to do with gaming.

Been rocking Pop! with a 3080 for about 3 months with only a few minor gripes. Darktide had some weird tiny lag in it somewhere that I couldn’t nail down but every other game I’ve played has worked just fine. And for some reason if I connect to mullvad using their app before opening Firefox, it’ll lag out for 10-15 secs.

Everything else has been rock solid. I’d prefer KDE to Gnome, but with Dash to Panel, the Pop Gnome is good enough for now. Cosmic should be out relatively soon. I tinkered with Nobara and KDE plasma 6 for a few days but it was nowhere near as stable, so I came right back to Pop.

I used Pop for a couple months (nvidia GPU) with no issues at all. It was rock solid! They also have a new DE coming soon (hopefully) that looks really good so far - context

Long time Fedora user here. I’ve used Manjaro for a few months before Fedora and I’ve switched to PopOS! a few months ago because it was better supported from my laptop manufacturer…

I’ve to admin I was a bit skeptical about switching to a Debian based distro, because I’m someone who likes to follow the latest news in the field and gets exited to try the latest stuff. But then I did and gosh if it’s a smoother experience compared to Fedora! (which itself was a notable smoother experience compared to Manjaro). I’m not saying that Fedora experience was bad, I still think is one (if not the) best compromise between usability and freshness, but I’d say that with Pop I’ve had even less troubles than with windows! The price of that? Being stuck with Gnome 42 after having tried the goodies of newer ones :/

TL;DR: If you think you can live without the latest magic from the linux community, to then I’d reccommend you Pop. Otherwise Manjaro is a good distro and from what I can remember NVIDIA drivers works almost out-of-the-box but be ready for some frequent minor troubleshooting sessions