Linux

You might want to try Bazzite if gaming is a major requirement.

Your case sounds like a perfect fit for Bazzite or Aurora.

• Both come already set up ootb, with all quality of life tweaks you want and need.
• They are image based distros ("immutable"), so you mainly work in your /var/ and /home/ directory, and all the other stuff is untouched and clean.
• They are very modern, getting the same updates at the same time as upstream Fedora.
• Running Ollama is just one ujust command away, many complex things are made easier with those commands
• You probably won't get a lot more performance I believe. At least when I switched from regular Fedora/ Silverblue to Bazzite, I didn't notice many more FPS in games for example.

Supports both programming and gaming

Both is super uncritical.

You can install Steam as Flatpak without any real or major issues nowadays and thanks to Proton you can basically play any games except those that use Windows-specific ring 0 spyware as their DRM or anti-cheat mechanism. Pro-Flatpak: You don't need to deal with 32-bit libs dependency hell.

Same with programing. The relevant compilers are all available for pretty much all common distributions. Same with the common scripting interpreters as well as all common IDEs.

but I’m considering moving it to a VM if the performance impact is manageable

Depending on your VM solution you can usually pass-through CPU and/or GPU and have nearly the same performance as on bare metal.

but am open to exploring new options.

This might be a bold move, but have you considered Arch Linux? You need to do most things by yourself, but the wiki is one of the best and most complete and extensive distribution-specific Linux wikis available. So if you're willing to read instructions and learn new things, why not give it a try? (Disclosure: Arch is my daily driver since 2008 on desktops, laptops and homeservers).

Fedora

seconding Fedora, i used to use archbased only but recently switched from win10 on my main machine and wanted a handy out of the box gamer distro with stability, been using Nobara which is really nice. of course you can get vanilla fedora configured just fine for gaming, etc. my draw was just the convenience factor. there is also Bazzite another "gamer" distro based on fedora atomic so even more stable.

I have an almost carbon copy of your hardware and I run endeavour OS dualbooting with a mini win11. Been doing it for about 3 years now. For software, I just install bauh and call it a day. This app has every thing from flatpaks to app images to the AUR (except snaps) and you go from there. I've been very happy with my set up. I have 4 separate drives in my machine so I have each OS on its own drive since windows loves to mess with grub every time it updates. Having them on separate drives makes it easier to recover if anything goes wrong.

EDIT: forgot to mention that I, too, play games and code on this machine. No issues whatsoever. I have KDE plasma on Wayland

Your hardware is nearly identical to mine. On my gaming PC, I use Nobara.

It's a distro created and maintained by the developer who works on the Glorious Eggroll version of Proton, so very well known in the Linux gaming community.

It's based on Fedora, but has a ton of Linux gaming tweaks for extra performance and compatibility patched into it and pre-installed.

It's very easy to download the ISO and install, and requires basically zero configuration out of the box to start gaming and using the PC.

The only thing I would caution you about, is the only use the built-in Nobara updater app to update your system. Don't use Fedora commands like DNF to update stuff, it will cause conflicts.

As long as you do that though, you should be fine. I've been using Nobara on my gaming PC for about 2 years now, and it's been awesome.

Mint seems decent all around. No cutting edges nor it's specialized in any areas, but it's a jack of all trades, and rather stable.

Been using PopOS for 2 years, it is nice and stable But I found it lacking in package department (cus Debian based), lots of things are outdated and I find myself constantly building apps from source. I'd go with Arch or Endeavour in a heartbeat, but my machine is a production machine at this point in time thus I can't afford downtime at all. I absolutely recommend Arch or derivatives. It is worth getting used to.

OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Rolling and up to date. Stable. Games well.

Oh i did read a bit about it. I would say it sounds good. And i like that its Fedora based. And it is not immutable, thats something i think i dont't want, because oft the higher lern curve Thanks

I usually don't recommend this distro but Fedora and its derivatives look like something you should consider. It's known for good support for developers and it heavily utilizes Flatpak. Fast update cycle (6 months) should help in gaming too. You'll just have to go through the pain that is Anaconda installer.