I'd honestly stick to proven, well-supported distros like openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora or Ubuntu, especially as a newcomer.

Just to really clarify: there is no real performance difference between "gaming" distros and any other one. They just have some stuff pre-installed you can just install yourself. The only real thing you want to be aware of are standard distros vs immutable distros. I would steer clear of immutable until you're more comfortable in general.

All that being said CachyOS (Arch based) is fine, but skip Nobara and just go stock Fedora Gnome or KDE to skip the prepackaged customizations and just get a clean experience.

Its a lot funner and faster to just test them all, grab ventoy throw all the isos on a ventoy usb, spend an hour installing and testing each, see if you like cachyos gaming packages and the wiki, or if you prefer another distro, I would go with a gaming distro the first time around so you figure out what packages you need and may want to keep in the future

The first question you should consider is whether you actually need a gaming distro. I've been using bare-ass Arch for both gaming and development and haven't had any performance or stability issues I didn't cause myself.

From the two options, Nobara is likely better for a beginner. It's based on Fedora, which has good support ~~and doesn't do anything fucky with the kernel.~~ (it does, the kernel is built with patches and custom options)

Cachy is based on Arch, which in itself requires a more in-depth knowledge of the system and/or a willingness to learn. The performance improvements they advertise with the customized kernel and scheduler options are really only relevant if you want to squeeze the last bit of performance out of the system. Your day-to-day experience will be the same.

I use cachyos, its nice, has everything for gaming in a post insrall script you click a button, just install it and you wont want to distrohop, it has a good wiki, many yt videos, benefit is the aur, if you dont care about the aur go bazzite (only reason I don't use bazzite is aur, otherwise all Id use are flatpaks)

What's easy to use is pretty subjective. As a game developer, you're already at least a step or two removed from the proverbial average computer user. I suggest downloading live images of a few different distros and desktop environments, and playing with each for a while to get a feel for the differences.

I'm a gamer and developer, too. KDE Plasma is my desktop of choice these days.

I need to be able to use Unreal Engine

Someone else asked about this just 8 days ago, here:

https://beehaw.org/post/21209323

Regarding that particular requirement:

The Unreal Engine for Linux page indicates that they offer pre-compiled builds for Ubuntu 22.04.

It's possible that those pre-compiled builds might work on Linux Mint, since Mint is based on Ubuntu. I would probably try this before committing to the officially supported Ubuntu version, both because it's nice to have a newer distro and because Mint has a good track record of avoiding Ubuntuisms that are not generally well received (e.g. Snap).

If you don't mind some extra work, you can apparently build Unreal for other linux distros. See here:
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/linux-development-quickstart-for-unreal-engine

I tried a few and so far I am finding CachyOS to be the most painless.

I don't have any interest in things like Blender or Unreal Engine but I'm curious what makes them incompatible with Bazzite? The only thing that's been a real PITA for me is old printer drivers (like a 15yo printers).

What is your current OS?

I am also trialing cachyOS as a win10 replacement and I am liking it.

If your current OS supports virtualisation (as in not a home version of windows) run them in a VM and see how the os goes with normal tasks you do.

I went through the whole Cachy, Nobara, or Pika and finally said fuck it and loaded up Cachy this past weekend. Wasn’t getting anywhere with my analysis paralysis. Pretty happy with it so far tbh.

Now if I can just figure out how to get this stupid xone driver to work so I can use my Xbox controller I’ll be happy.

Try it, and if you don't like it try another. They're free.

It doesn't matter.

If you are new to Linux, you should honestly just go with a more stable and simple distribution. I always recommend Linux Mint for its simplicity or Kubuntu for its familiarity with Windows.

I've used both nobara and cachyos, and I've stuck with nobara. it's a lot more of a "just works" distro for gaming and creative stuff (vr "just worked", so did connecting an xbox controller wirelessly, and using my drawing tablet) and its more set up out of the box than cachy. I enjoy a distro that I can install and get going immediately with no issues, and without having to install a bunch of other packages myself to get it to do what I want it to do. also when I ran cachy last year on both my desktop and my laptop, I got a month in and my repos completely broke, dont know why and couldn't figure out how to fix it, so that's something to keep in mind.

I run nobara on three separate machines with different hardware in each. So far it's been rock solid. I do a fair bit of development on one of them including some blender modeling and it seems to be fine. Blender isn't quite as snappy for me on Linux as opposed to Windows but that could just be my somewhat older hardware. The Dev/blender machine is an older MSI laptop with a 3060 in it.

Don't be afraid to give nobara a shot.

I do all the things you described and I am daily driving PikaOS (shares some development/developers with Nobara I believe, it's just Debian-based instead of Fedora-based) and it's been perfect for me. I haven't used Nobara personally but assuming it's similar to PikaOS I would happily recommend it for developer use.

One of the things you could do as a new Linux user is to try out some support questions with your favorite search engine. Try 'catchyos my headset mic is not working' or 'nobara how do I change my background wallpaper every 15 minutes' or ' <real problem you've had the past 2 years>'.

This approach will give you an realistic view how much support you will have when you're dealing with an actual problem.

If you were only gaming I'd recommend CachyOS. I made the switch about a year ago with no hassles or tinkering. I will say though when updating it is important to pay attention to any warnings and keep a backup with something like timeshift to rollback to in emergencies!

Since you have development as another use case I'd be more inclined to use a fresh install of something like fedora and customise it yourself. I'd imagine it's less likely to break a new install rather than a customised fork if you try to change something.

Fedora.

Possibly Open Suse

As a first distro why make it more complicated?

BTW: Never Ubuntu.

CachyOS, at the end of the day feels and acts like a bleeding edge linux distro. Fedora on the other hand hides all of that and yet is also bleeding edge. I usually get packages BEFORE CachyOS with Fedora (matter of days usually, but just highlighting how current it usually is).

I've started with Mint, switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed soon after because I wanted KDE. Swtiched to Fedora now.

IMO, if you can use Mint, you can use Fedora or OpenSUSE. They're just as easy.

OpenSUSE comes with easy BTRFs snapshots and home folder encryption setup in the installer. But it is a slightly oddball distro and a few things sometimes work a little different which sometimes requires workarounds. It comes with decent gui tools as well for maintining your packages and repository (yast)

Fedora is more mainstream, but doesn't have the abovementioned features easily accessible in the install or out of the box. You can have nice gui for managing your packages and repositories but it has to be installed by you. I still made the btrfs and encryption happen by following a tutorial on youtube. I'm happy with it.

IMO btrfs snapshots are essential to making the distro beginner friendly. It significantly simplifies fixing something that broke.