So I was thinking of switching my desktop to linux. I have been running fedora on my laptop for 3 years and I really like it. My main question now is just what distro works best for gaming (considering my specs) and can I use VMs in any of the gaming oriented ones (mostly because I don't wanna keep dual booting).
Edit: I have gone with Bazzite for now and it seems to be working fine. Some games don't rrally work acceptably (I expected that) so I will keep dual booting for a while.
Benchmarks online tend to show very minimal performance difference between distros. The main difference with gaming distros will be ease of installation of gaming stuff like gamemode, etc. Some distros also have a Steam Picture like mode if you prefer that. Besides the "gaming" stuff, the distros are otherwise just a normal Linux experience so yes you can install a VM software like normal.
Bazzite and CachyOS are two popular suggestions. Bazzite is a Fedora atomic spin for gaming and has specific images setup for your hardware. CachyOS is arch based and has optimized packages for your specific hardware