I was thinking of temple OS

Is this a troll post, or did you get trolled?

I’ve been gaming on Linux Mint for the last…four years? I think? It’s been smooth sailing for most of that time. Steam/Proton changed everything and I would say that I’m able to play 95% of the games that I want to.

I ran mint for a long time on my main rig. It’s solid and will do most everything you need to. My machine is similar in spec to yours so you shouldn’t have any issues. I only recently switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed as i wanted to try something more bleeding edge but boy do I miss Cinnamon.

Mint is what i run on my main, as it’s excellent as a daily driver. Been doing that for over 10 years now. On my other more specialized machines I run other distros more suited to the function.

Mint is pretty hassle free to set up for gaming, really. Once you have your GPU driver installed, just:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install steam

Try it and see how it goes.

Manjaro is my current flavour of Linux, but been gaming on Linux for over the last 2 decades on a few dustros. The technology changed alot since then and Steam’s proton was the massive game changer. though now I am in the process of moving away from steam but still use proton via other game launches. Trying out lutris currently.

distro’s

No need for the punctuation. In fact, it’s confusing to put it in as we don’t pluralize with an apostrophe; ever.

Thoughts or suggestions?

Everyone has a favourite distro. You’re going to hear everyone tell you why their favourite distro is perfect for you.

I personally hate it, but Ubuntu is a very accessible distro. If you have no idea about the validation errors inherent in the deb format, nor how flatpaks and snaps completely kill validation even harder, and why that throws consistency out the window and thus impacts security, then use Ubuntu until you know better.

Specs:

You’re fine. It’s not going to make a differentiating difference either way. If your specs can run Linux, then basically every one of them is mostly equally suited, unless your hardware is super small and/or oddball. You can rest assured that the Bunts and Mints and Arch people will continue to suggest their favourite distro regardless, as nothing in your list is so weird or small as to exclude any of them.

Anyway, use the bunt (if mint isn’t indicated here, despite being what you know best right now). Mint’s off my list too - validation ergo security - but it’s fine and valid if you ignore that issue like everyone does.

I recently went mint on my laptop for the first time in years, and it’s been great.

That being said, I’m now looking at switching to endeavoros instead to give me more desktop environment options. Maybe check that out?

Try partitioning and dual-booting to see if it’ll run everything you need.