Interestingly, I had the opposite experience.

With Ubuntu I kept running into bugs which had already been fixed upstream, or which were caused either by Debian's or Ubuntu's patches. And even filing regular bug reports was basically impossible: the Ubuntu packagers will almost certainly ignore it, the Debian packagers aren't interested in bugs happening in mutated versions of outdated packages in their unstable repo, and the upstream maintainers aren't interested in bug reports for weirdly-patched old releases.

After several attempts at getting bugs fixed (sometimes even sending complete patches) and getting no response for years I gave up on Ubuntu and switched to Fedora. Their policy is to ship the freshest upstream releases possible, with as few patches as possible. This means I can just directly file my bug reports at the upstream vendor, and a fix will usually land on my system fairly quickly.

I do notice that I am slowly using more and more Flatpak desktop apps: why bother with the middleman when you can trivially get the latest release directly from the upstream vendor?

I've been using the latest Fedora full-time for over two years without issue, and have been doing nearly all my gaming on it as well. The only gaming that doesn't work are games that deliberately use anti-cheat that doesn't support anything but Windows (typically the games run great in single player or offline, but multiplayer refuses to work). Of my Steam catalog, over 90% just works, and a large amount of that now has native Linux support thanks to the Steam Deck.

What particular issues were you experiencing?

As a counter anecdote, on my Windows installation I routinely run into "WTF" moments, such as BitLocker randomly deciding I need to enter recovery codes, the constant nagware that is OneDrive and friends, plus when I search for the same binary exe I've launched a dozen times Windows still displays "web results" first - fooling me just about every time.

Hey, many thanks for this, sorry I didn't notice this comment earlier.

So, I have several of the games I play since forever (and will play some more), like Skyrim, but I can't play it without mods because it just looks bad (and I prefer slightly adjusted gameplay).

I've seen ProtonDB entry on that and it looks half promising, half problematic. Maybe I'll dust off my old nvme for this?

I _think_ I'll try going the Bazzite way - based on Fedora I actually like, reasonably sensible approach to security - and might as well stay IF they support Veracrypt well.

And yeah, Windows deception is awful, thankfully most of it can be disabled (until the next sw update).