I run Bazzite and Garuda (with the cachyos kernel). Only the Garuda box is Nvidia and has been great since kde+Wayland+Nvidia stabilized a year or so ago.

I think any of them (including cachyos) is a good choice. Optimization is diminishing returns, so I’d be looking for a distro with the default settings and tools I like as a much higher priority.

For example, I like Garuda’s btrfs with automatic checkpoints on upgrade so I can just send a garuda update (which is pacman Syu with bells and whistles) and almost ignore the output even when I get lazy and don’t update for a month. Don’t take this as a recommendation to ignore updates on an arch-based distro. There will eventually be consequences.

With bazzite, updates really are in the same class because of the immutable base. But I’m also deep into containers and have no issue with the ergonomics of layering and management, which are improving, but definitely not very newbie friendly.

Anyway, give them test drives. You’d be surprised how much changing a package manager can impact your ability to do things for a while if you aren’t familiar.

I’ve been daily driving CachyOS for a while now. It’s fast, and I like the rolling release model. It pretty much worked with my 4070 out of the box I believe, I don’t think I had to do anything special there. I started with Cinnamon as my DE, but eventually moved to Gnome (Cinnamon still uses X11 I believe, and there were things that just worked better with Wayland, and with a handful of extensions, I can get it to look the way I like).

That being said, I wouldn’t recommend it to people less comfortable with Linux. CachyOS has its own repositories (which is the whole idea, the software is compiled specifically for more modern hardware), but it can sometimes be confusing when choosing packages to install. The wiki is pretty helpful though, especially with getting games up and running.