Can't you give Blender access to the GPU using the Flatseal app?

CS2 runs well on Linux for me. Though as you say other multiplayer games are an issue.

Immutable/Atomic it's mostly semantics for the average user.

SteamOS and Bazzite feel very similar to each other with every day use.

Bazzite does most of the things SteamOS does but based on Fedora instead of Arch. They are both atomic desktop variants.

They both feel very similar to actually use.

In what way?? Mostly the user doesn't need to even think about what package format they are using. The distro makes the decision for you.

There's nothing really confusing about it. Just use the packages the distro provides.

In my experience it does. However Linux will be Linux and I won't guarantee what works for me will work for you.

I will say if your NVIDIA system doesn't work well on Bazzite it likely it won't work well with any Linux distro. Bazzite has the best out of the box setup.

Use the NVIDIA version of Bazzite. It's the most user friendly Linux distro for NVIDIA users imo.

Maybe try Cosmic DE? It's still in alpha but it is an auto-tiling wm.

universal-blue.org

If you ever decide to go the atomic route in future I strongly recommend one of the Ublue distros over Silverblue. They come with more sane defaults as well as graphics drivers codecs etc.

Just pick the flavor for you. Aurora for KDE, Bluefin for Gnome, Bazzite for gaming optimizations.

I appreciate the sentiment but it's not really a proton issue if you're trying to run a Linux native game and it's not as if Windows works flawlessly for everybody either.

For new users I recommend any of the distros from the UBlue project. They come with graphics drivers, the latest kernels and they are incredibly user friendly.

universal-blue.org

Only if your hardware is compatible with their often 2 year old kernel. Directing people to Mint can put people off pretty quickly when they install it and find out their brand new cpu isn't supported.

Most Linux distros have a lot in common. It's not like "Oh no we've taught you Linux in Ubuntu installing Fedora is pointless!".

Personally I think the Ublue distros are the most new user friendly of any around. They have an up to date stack, and they maintain and update themselves.

They are the only distro I could recommend that have a true hands-off experience.

One of the problems in Linux is users recommending poor distros to new users. If all the people recommending Mint instead recommended Bazzite we would get fewer "I tried Linux and it didn't work" posts.