Well, Ubuntu is definitely not the way to go. They are very microsofty at the moment and keep trying to make snaps happen, and they aren't gonna happen.
Wanna game? Use nobara OS, and if that is too hard then try bazzite.
Literally all the tinkering is baked in for gaming by the guy who makes alternative windows emulator runtimes and hes a straight fucking boss.
Gnome can't use the argument that "theming our apps is incompatible" and then at the same time not allow other DEs to manage window controls and the like to be compatible. Shit attitude and shit arguments.
Libadwaita is only compatible with gnome and only works with gnome. Other DE's can try to make it work in their DE, but the experience for them is hostile.
To put it mildly, gnome devs are being dicks about it as much as they can be, because they consider themselves the only "real" desktop environment to Linux.
If you want your apps to be cross platform, you can just use gtk3/gtk4 instead, or any other ui library. Even QT.
I use gnome ATM because I think paperwm is the best desktop experience on any OS, but the gnome DE devs are just assholes and they break my heart.