I just went through this decision. I landed on Garuda with Nobara a close second. I was coming from Manjaro which was almost completely stable for the last 3.5 yrs. I was only moving because I picked up a new SSD and wanted to see what else was out there.

I chose Garuda not because of the better gaming or perf, but for the preconfigured BTRFS with auto snapshots on upgrade and the presence of a distributed team reduces the “bus factor” problem that Nobara has for future updates and support.

I’ve been caught out a few times from upgrades on rolling distributions, so the simplified approach to rollbacks is greatly appreciated.

Now for the caveats:

You won’t get Wayland with Garuda and Nvidia by default (at least with their “stock” dr460gonized edition on KDE). And if you have more than one screen, I’d say that’s probably for the best right now (especially if they vary in resolution, refresh rate, or orientation).

I’ve found that there’s a few little polish things that leave me a bit wanting, but they’re by no means deal breakers: one of my USB hubs won’t reinitialize after waking from suspend (which worked just fine in Manjaro) and color codes (but not full escape sequences) are printed in terminal applications (eg man journalctl prints 1mDescription0m and the like). They’re both probably issues with the Garuda customizations, so I figure debugging them will help me understand things a bit better.

If you’re willing/able to hop between distro for a bit, I’d suggest trying at least a couple on for size and seeing how they fit you!