Getting rid of Windows -- Blood's list of Linux distros

It's exactly what I did. The Win11 NVME has been removed from my Acer completely and I have not used Win for, shite, nearly a year and a half now.
Linux now has all the tools to run Win games flawlessly -- Steam Proton/ProtonGE (a modified Proton maintained by a Fedora developper that is FAR superior), Vulkan, DXVK for DirectX emulation... Fallout 4 runs flawlessly on Void on my Acer Nitro, so does Skyrim, Doom, Wolfenstein, hell, anything I threw at it, just works as well as it does on Win.
Lutris handles GOG, battle.net, the Ubisoft client and others.
It's now more possible than ever to ditch Win and move on to better pastures.
The ProtonGE dev also forked Fedora into Nobara, a Linux distro made specially for gaming. Might be worth a look.

https://nobaraproject.org/

Thanks for the link. You're making a strong case here, not going to lie the prospect of ditching Windows once and for all is enticing.

I did and never looked back.
My Void system is built the way I want it, with what I need installed and that's it. I despise system bloat. I used to enjoy Devuan, but a base Devuan has well over 1500 packages because apt pulls entire useless deptrees.
A basic Void install in comparaison is less than 600. So it's very frugal on space, and I idle at less than 600MB of RAM, which granted is more than Nutyx, but Void has multilib enabled for native Steam support.
I believe Nobara has a live ISO, you can tinker with thst and see how you like it
Under the hood, it's probably far less issues than Redcore/Gentoo and updates will be significantly faster.
Plus Nobara has support for Optimus/dual-GPU right out of the box and drivers forlr your GPU are a one click install
I do not use Nobara because I do not like SystemD but ir's a fine distro
Fedora on gaming roids

600MB RAM sounds awesome to me. I may look into this one for the old machine.

Like I said, Void will need some time and a few brain cells but once you are setup, then you are golden
I can help you as needed of course
OR
I could write a little how-to on how to get properly started if that would help

Thanks but please don't trouble yourseld with that on my account. It's going to be a while before I have time to dabble with all this stuff as much as I wish to give it a proper go.

Alpine

Alpine is a small, lightweight, secure distro. It's not per se designed to be used as a desktop, but with a bit of tweaking, it works just fine for the job. A basic Alpine install with Xfce idled at about 400ish MBs which is excellent.
Alpine uses musl libc versus traditional glibc. Musl is not affected by security flaws affecting glibc. Musl is lighter on hardware, but glibc is faster.
So what does that change for the end user?
Well, most big programs, like Steam, will expect glibc and are not easily compatible with musl. This means Steam for example, needs to be run through Docker, or Flatpak. I am not a fan of that approach but there are undeniable security advantages to running sandboxed applicationa.

Alpine uses APK for package management. It's syntax is fairly simple --
Apk add <package name>
Apl remove <package name>
Apk search <package name>
Alpine has an official repo, and a user repo for more packages. I found a majority of what I was looking for on the Alpine repos.

A base Alpine install does not have X11/DE/WM/LightDM so this needs to be setup. It's a fairly easy process.

Overall, while it's not it's primary calling, Alpine can make a fine desktop distro, but as mentioned, expect some quirks with musl instead of glibc.

NVIDIA: Untested. Available in repos
Optimus: Also Untested. I do not plan on installing Alpine on my Acer Nitro.

Technically I've spent most of my life on the Alps so I like the sound of that.

Yes BUT like I said, desktop is NOT Alpine's primary calling
It can be turned into one with some time and braincells but an install is very barebones, almost LFS like.
And also like I said Steam will need to be run via Flatpak and file permissions for Flatpak can be painful
I have Alpine on my ThiccPad E460 and I will attempt to daily drive it
Nutyx has an issue with Flatpak Steam related to my kernel which I am also working on figuring out
I would love to run Nutyx as daily driver otherwise Alpine will work also
Networking on Alpine is a bit finnicky also requiring IWD which is not the most friendly or useful tool but hey ho

Nutyx has a bug that prevents some Steam Flatpak games from launching properly. It's been reported in the upstream and is beung looked at. I am switching back to my Alpine HDD in the meanwhile.

Re: Venom Linux

I do believe I mentioned how much I love Venom Linux but simultaneously how much it irritated me and how I could never get it working right. Vulkan would never work properly preventing me from running RMMZ and other games.
Well, I decided to revisit it this week on my ThiccPad E460, the freak Intel/AMD abomination.
I saw new Venom ISOs with Wayland, which is the successor to Xorg/X11 which at this point is widely used abandonware. So I thought, why not, let's try.
Little did I know, this was the missing link to actually getting Venom working right.
Wayland defaults to the discrete GPU aka the powerhouse one, in this case my Radeon R7 M360.
It took a bit of tweaking, but Vulkan FINALLY worked right. Thrilled, I downloaded RMMZ... And it WORKS FLAWLESSLY!
I was about to abandon hope on this ThiccPad. Now, I can use it as daily driver at work and leave my Acer at home.
Problem is, only a handful of window managers/desktop environments support Wayland... But I can deal with it.
So at last, Venom Linux, is a success!

Obligatory Neofetch of Alpine running on my Fujitsu LifeBook w/Flatpak Steam (because Alpine is musl and not glibc)

Spoiler:

Chimera Linux

Chimera is, well, exactly what the name implies.
It uses musl libc instead of glibc (less zero day attacks), APK from Alpine as a package manager, the FreeBSD userland (for userspaces and other under the hood tasks), and the dinit init.
Chimera is a DIY distro. It can be installed from a Live ISO (full graphical mode), or as a rootfs (command line). It supports the ZFS file system out of the box. ZFS acts as both your file system and disk manager, and there is a reason why it's a BSD staple -- it's that good.
It is also a young distro -- it only got stable a few months ago. But for such a young distro z it is incredibly stable.
Using APK from Alpine means package management is lightning fast and efficient, and Chimera uses APK version 3 which as far as I know is unreleased on Alpine.
Packages are more limited though all the basics are there.
In terms of desktop environments/window manager Chimera ships with Gnome by default, which frankly isn't my favourite with it's tablet-esque interface.
Plasma is too buggy for now.

Chimera is an interesting hybrid, and I like the time I had with it so far. It bundles a lot of things I like together, musl, APK and dinit.

Nvidia: Available in repos. Untested -- installed on an amdgpu machine
Optimus: Untested. Nvidia is a pain in the arse with Wayland and I am not installing Chimera on my Acer Nitro.

Next up will be Funtoo. Aka Gentoo if it made sense.