I installed Debian + KDE on my mom’s laptop. She hasn’t had a complaint since. How tech-savvy is she, you ask? I’m sitting with her right now, so out of politeness she put on headphones to watch her favorite soap opera. Mind you, the headphones weren’t plugged into the laptop. She was sitting there, headphones on her head, sound coming through the speakers, watching her soaps like this is how it’s meant to be done.
No joke. I’ve been blown away by what my old used Steam Deck is capable of to the point that I’ve already decided that I’m done with Windows. I’ll probably build a new PC soon (my 2015 laptop is only about as powerful as the Steam Deck) and I’m currently favoring Nobara as my replacement OS when I pull the trigger on parts and get started building. As somebody else pointed out, some games like Call of Duty use kernel based anticheat so only Windows will work for those games, but the only competitive online multiplayer game I ever play is Rocket League and that works pretty well on my Steam Deck as is. If you’re already a PC gamer, you’re used to having to do some troubleshooting here and there, and it seems like it’s maybe 1-5% more work to troubleshoot those occasional issues when you’re running Linux. I’m not a computer whiz or anything, just semi decent at eventually figuring out logic. If you can figure out how to get a Lemmy account and use an app for it on your phone, you can figure out gaming on Linux.