I switched to macOS pretty for all my day-to-day, development and work uses, but still have a Ryzem+RTX (I do use Ray tracing features) desktop that I only ever use for gaming anymore.
I play games from Steam, GoG, Epic, and occasionally Xbox Game Pass.
The big problem here is I’m visually impaired and need a desktop environment that will let me consistently use a lime green mouse cursor and zoom in full screen via keyboard and scroll shortcuts.
At the risk of 1) nobody having actual experience and 2) the current Linux distro/DE ecosystem being hopelessly broken, what should I try?
I also only have some 2 hours a week for videogames. I can’t afford the time to tinker, after the transition and setup period.
I’m perfectly happy with “you’re outta luck, buddy, just suffer through Windows,” but I figure it can’t hurt to ask…
Honestly, if you don’t have the time to tinker and learn the system you’d probably have a pretty bad time with Linux.
Pretty much regardless of distro or DE, you are going to find games that either outright will fail to run or will require some tinkering and additional troubleshooting on your part to get them to run. Nvidia GPU support, while improving, is still pretty lackluster. Especially if you want things like raytracing or DLSS.
Also, it’ll be an entirely new OS, with its own learning curve just to figure out how to do basic things.
If you only have two hours a week to game and you want to be able to just jump into a game, know that it’s going to work, and not worry about it, I wouldn’t even say stick with Windows. I’d say stick with game consoles. All of the current gen consoles have some pretty good accessibility features for people who visually impaired.
All of that said, if you still wanted to try out a Linux distro, since your main focus is gaming, I’d recommend Bazzite. It’s generally pretty stable, is very easy to rollback if an update breaks something, and has a version that is preconfigured for nvidia gpus. In its installer you can choose your DE, I’d say go with KDE, since it has all of the accessibility features you listed, you’d just need to enable them in settings.
Oh, I really should have mentioned I’ve used Linux a fair bit, including desktop. Just not in a few years and never for gaming.
Is ray tracing hit or miss or would it be best to forget about it?
I haven’t tried any RT stuff on linux since the 30 series launched and then it was very hit or miss, a cursory google search makes it sound like things have improved substantially though.