If you're only going to pick Pop!_OS or Manjaro, I'd suggest you go with Pop!_OS. The Manjaro team has been very weird, and made some poor decisions in recent years. I've had a very good experience messing around with Pop on an Nvidia GPU.
I just hope they don't update their previous titles to require a PSN account.
Fr. Had me thinking ASUS Motherboards. Really had me going there😅
Yes. It means we have better compatibility with DirectX shaders on Linux. It enables a unified shader development workflow across platforms. Developers can focus on HLSL without worrying about different shader languages for Windows and Linux.
I'm still in shock how quickly they have progressed.
The first "2" probably indicates that it's a sequel. "Ship" probably refers to the developers, "Harbour Masters" who made "Ship of Harkinian", the PC port of Ocarina of Time. The second "2" (I'm not too sure on this) might again, refer to it being a sequel, and "Harkinian" is likely taken from "King Harkinian" from the old Zelda CD-i games.
Since you have Nvidia you'll want to use the Nvidia proprietary drivers for the best performance. The open source driver for Nvidia (nouveau) is awful when it comes to gaming performance, unfortunately. (Although this will soon be fixed with NVK)
Depending on your distro of choice, you'll need to figure out whether you want Secure Boot on or not. I believe Windows 10 doesn't require Secure Boot to be enabled, but I think Windows 11 does. So depending on how frequent you want to be booting into Windows this might be a bit of an annoyance. You can leave Secure Boot disabled and use the Nvidia Proprietary drivers as-is, but if you want to enable Secure Boot you'll have to sign the Kernel yourself - it's a pretty straight forward process.
I recommend you try to keep Secure Boot enabled for the added benefit of security and ease of use when dual-booting, but if you don't want to go through the hassle of signing your own Kernel, then simply leaving Secure Boot disabled when in Linux will suffice.
I recommend against using Ubuntu because of Canonical's many poor decisions with Ubuntu. I won't get into it right now, but if you're comfortable with Ubuntu don't let me stop you from using it.
In reality, you can use whatever distro you want. One distro isn't inherently better at gaming then another. It's a matter of configuration.
I would say wait to buy an AMD card (but you do you). Wayland Explicit Sync is out in the 555 driver, and NVK is cooking.
TLDR; It started as a young teen who just wanted to get games for free; It continues because companies don't give two flying hoots about me.
Currently, I pirate because I can't rightfully give any money to these anti-consumer companies that will only victimize me. I can't own anything anymore, and this absolutely frustrates me. If I could own the media I purchase, I wouldn't pirate anymore. (by this I mean I wouldn't pirate the media I consume. I'd still data hoard because it's a literal addiction, please help!!)
I don't pirate games anymore; or better said, I rarely pirate games, and when I do they're ran in a VM with VFIO because I really don't like the idea of running arbitrary code on my system; even though we have reputable, vetted, and trustworthy groups. (As a general rule, I don't trust what I can't verify.) I buy all my games on Steam for convenience, and I opt to use Goldberg's Steam Emulator (which is open source!!) to store backups of my games, and this setup works wonderfully! I stay away from games with invasive DRM like Denuvo (I play these in a VM), and I've long stopped buying EA and Ubisoft games. The only forms of media I pirate nowadays are movies, and music (and the occasional game).
Or as I've taken to calling it; GNU+Linux