There’s a million distros but they fall into some pretty broad categories. The biggest categories are corporate vs community and rolling vs stable/intermittent updates.
Corporate distros are built by or sponsored/heavily influenced by corporations. (Though they’re often built on top of a community distro, not from whole cloth) Ubuntu is developed by canonical, Fedora by Red Hat (now IBM), SUSE by Novell which is currently owned by some firm I don’t know anything about. They tend to be developed for a wide variety of use cases and often have paid support tiers or have one project that’s sold with support to organizations and another free tier that doesn’t have the paid support. Community based distro are made by volunteers and foundations and don’t have a profit motivated arm, like Debian or Arch.
Then there’s rolling vs. Stable. Rolling releases update every software package as the update comes in. New versions, bugfixes, etc, you get them as they’re released. Stable or intermittent releases release on a set time period and the idea is everything is compatible at the time of release, and only bugfixes are released until the next big version. There are exceptions to that but it’s the basic idea.
The last thing to keep an eye on is the desktop environment. This is the look, feel, and workflow of your UI and how you interact with the computer. There are two big ones, Gnome and KDE. Gnome is used on Ubuntu and most of it’s derivatives, and has a pretty specific workflow though it’s customizable through extensions. KDE is extremely customizable but in my opinion looks a bit more old fashioned by default.
You can make a live USB of most Linux distros and play around with them without altering your computer. You’d boot from the USB as if it were a hard drive and try it out. Most distros home page have step by step instructions for this.
Gaming on Linux is currently in a pretty good place. Ive been able to play new AAA games in the launch week on Linux and also some old games from the early 2000’s. If a game is extremely obscure or has anti-cheat, you might have issues but it’s been surprisingly smooth for me and my partner, who is a complete Linux noob and is gaming fully on a fedora based distro I installed for them.
My advice would be to try out Pop!_OS, fedora, and anything that catches your eye and decide. I’d recommend against Arch for a first distro if you’re worried about being overwhelmed, the install takes a bit more understanding of how a Linux system works. I’d also recommend against Manjaro, as it’s had some issues in the past that caused some people to.lose faith in the dev team, And I’d recommend against Ubuntu which is currently working on a semi-walled garden that bothers some people both for ideological and performance reasons.
I’m personally on Nobara, which is based on Fedora with a lot of gaming necessities built in, so installing your operating system also installs steam and a lot of the compatibility software it needs. It’s a great distro and also one I think would be easy to use.
Feel free to PM me with any questions, I’d.love to help more if needed. I’m not an engineer so I can’t really help with regard to engineering software but I can probably help more if I know your specific hardware and can help with any questions that come up.
Hard to make a real recommendation without knowing your budget and general likes/dislikes. Like screen size, weight, clamshell vs convertible, integrated graphics vs dedicated GPU. I know you said gaming but integrated is great for indie and retro gaming and can handle some.modern stuff but a dgpu is needed if you’re playing AAA titles and care about graphics and framerate, etc.
For everyone who says Linux runs on anything, that’s mostly true but specific hardware components are still problematic. Most fingerprint scanners won’t work if the laptop comes with Windows and you’re installing yourself, the same for any unique hardware feature.
I have the Thinkpad x1 yoga gen 7 and everything works including the OR camera for facial recognition and the fingerprint scanner.