Yup, the official driver is your best option for gaming. No experience with fedora here. I think they use wayland instead of X11 by default, right? I know that wayland had a tough time with Nvidia gpus. No idea if anything has changed in the last two years.

Most problems with newer cards have been fixed with version 550. Gaming related, the only thing that will cause you pain is VR or Kernel Level AC

If you decide to buy a MacBook (and from my recent experience with an M1 Pro I would advise against it) you should check in advance if all your daily software is available. Asahi itself is fairly stable and enjoyable to use, the software repo is still lacking in a lot of places though. As others have said, you’ll probably be better off financially and mentally with a decently specced used Thinkpad if Linux is your primary OS.

Googles implementation of RCS, the one they are pushing as standard, is indeed proprietary

Works fantastic. I’m currenlty playing it through Gamepass and GeforceNow with Priority(have it for other Games anyway), since the Gamepass Version is locked to 30fps. It’s a bit more complicated than running an .exe, but a well documented setup.

Have fun :)