https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/gaming/proton/ would be the relevant set of instructions that a user would find upon typing "fedora steam". And it's maybe ten lines of instruction or a couple pages of GUI, because they're including such steps as “scroll down” and “close the window”.
That is amazing news! My biggest gripe with Fedora has always been that it is recommended to new users and then 80% of the time they have an Nvidia card and you end up with "Linux sucks if you use Nvidia" even though the official drivers work well if you install them correctly (i.e using your distro-provided method, not going to nvidia.com and downloading a file which is what most people coming from Windows will do).
The new installer isn't as good as Ubuntu's IMHO, but holy moly it's so much better than the old one. I recently tried installing Fedora Silverblue (which still has the old installer), and besides being terribly confusing, it also errored out consistently This led me to install regular Fedora and then convert it to Silverblue, so I got to compare the two installers. It's not even funny how much better it is.
I've used the official nVidia drivers, they definitely don't work well compared to AMD/Intel on Linux. They're usable and more or less stable, but on my computer I was seeing stuff like window contents freezing, graphics stuttering, screen tearing on video playback, the mouse cursor lagging when there was high CPU usage, etc. and it all went away when I switched to an AMD card. Everyone I've talked to has has the same experience: weird performance hiccups or glitches that go away as soon as you stop using nVidia.
I've used the official Nvidia drivers on Linux for 5 years now and had excellent performance and few or no graphical glitches, with most issues coming early on. None within the last 2 years. Never experienced high CPU or freezing.
My cards have been a 2080, 3070 Ti, 4070M, and 4090. I could barely get an AMD card (6600 or something?) to work.
Now you have talked to someone who has not had that experience. And everyone I have talked to says they have had an experience either like mine, or like mine minus issues with AMD.
Performance is good but there are a few caveats. Namely dx12 perf (identified and being worked on), vram limit stutter (doesn't page to system memory well), HDR enabling requiring basically a hack because Nvidia doesn't want to implement color managent wayland uses, and some other annoyances.
Usually this is not the main problem that people run into. Most often we take basics of terminal usage and config management for granted, and these are the hardest parts for new comers to learn, because they often don't know the conventions and the unwritten laws of the typical config file format, and once they get a weird error due to for example a non-existent config file or insufficient permissions and they search the exact error message, they get lost in deep, unrelated technical discussions of more obscure problems that real sys-admins encounter. They don't know that they should search for the basics, and along with weird cryptic error messages they can easily get stuck on a trivial tasks for hours ...
The other day I handed my Arch laptop to a friend (a mechanical engineer) who liked tinkering with computers, had a few papers on $RECENT_AI_TOPICS, and was considering moving to arch to learn Linux. I advised him to start with Ubuntu and then move to arch, but he insisted so I gave him a quick test.
Since he was more or less comfortable with reading manuals and searching, I asked him to install nginx on my laptop and change the configs to listen on 8080. He eventually succeeded ... after 70 minutes or so. He installed nginx and started the service pretty easily in a couple of minutes, but then he got stuck on editing the config files. First, he wasn't familiar with the terminal file editors so he had to learn one (he chose vim and went through vimtutor) and then he opened the config file without sudo, so he couldn't save the file. Then he thought that maybe he needed to stop nginx first but that didn't work. And then he started reading nginx manuals and tutorials and SE threads for like 30 minutes. Finally he decided to search the vim error directly and then found the issue.
I have often heard similar stories, and I think the main hurdle for most people is not "the hard part" or RTFM, but it's "the unwritten part" and the conventions.
GP wasn't making a point about hand-editing configuration files, or rather, was obliquely making an obsolete point; he might as well have been complaining about modelines in xorg.conf.
“Repeat after me”, and then describes the normal flow after steam is installed, in a thread about choosing an operating system to install on bare hardware…
NobaraOS is Fedora based and has solved a lot of these issues. They have a separate ISO to use if you have an Nvidia card that will handle all the akmods drivers for you for example.
My advice to anyone looking to make the switch is to just use Ubuntu until you're comfortable with the way a linux desktop works. The "gaming optimizations" for these enthusiast distros are marginal at best, usually just margin of error type stuff. Frankly, in my own tests gaming performance is just as good if not BETTER on Ubuntu in the general case than most other distros even the ones that market themselves as "optimized for gaming".
If you install something like Bazzite all of a sudden you're in the deep end of needing to learn how immutable distros work. It will turn people off that don't give a damn about this stuff.
Ubuntu is simple, easy to configure from the GUI, works with most things out of the box - including Steam - and is supported like a first-class citizen by the vast vast VAST majority of application developers.
Sure, you could use Fedora. But you need to know about enabling RPM Fusion, 32 bit repos for steam, etc. Now THAT is how you get someone to give up.