Have you considered Mint? I tried PopOS but found the support wasn't great. Mint is also based on Ubuntu but adds extra functionality and skips some of the dumb stuff Canonical is pushing (i.e. snaps for everything).

As far as games: VM's are not really a good bet unless maybe you've got multiple video chips and are willing to invest time in getting GPU passthrough working (and then you really haven't escaped Microsoft so why not just dual-boot).

I've found that games on Linux (particularly Steam games) with Proton are pretty damn good and only getting better over time. Valve has put a lot of work into that with the Steam Deck (which also runs on Linux) and the non-valve versions also sometimes cover stuff that can't (like certain copy protections).

Your can see the rating for games on Linux with Proton here

I’m looking to escape Microsoft ... Windows VM ... Call of Duty

You're not escaping Microsoft when putting Microsoft Windows in a VM and you're not escaping Microsoft either when playing a game series that will be owned by Microsoft within the next few months.

Why not stay with Arch? Fedora has an uncertain Future due to RedHat. Anything else is probably fine, but it depends on what you want to achieve.

Regarding VM gaming it is working fine for the most part, but there are a few anti cheat engines which block VMs so your milage will vary (Escape from Tarkov, Rainbow Six Siege and I think Valorant don't work, most other games do last time I checked). Keep in mind you need a mainboard which plays nice with IOMMU, a CPU with enough cores and you probably want two graphics cards. One dedicated for passthrough. If you don't have a purpose built computer for this your results might not be great.

Playing Windows games in a Windows VM is not escaping Microsoft though, but others already said that.

If you don't mind the Red Hat shit, Fedora.

To second what others have said: VM's aren't suitable for gaming regrettably.

PopOS is a rather reliable distro, and I personally have loved the window tiling features they added, but it should be noted that they only have LTS from a year ago at the moment. I think that's just while they work on their new desktop environment, but the older packages might be a tad bit of a transition coming from Arch.

Some game anti-cheat can detect VMs and will still block you. Dual booting is the highest compatibility path if that's what you value the most. Your choice of distro here doesn't matter too much, if you do go the VM route.

As far as distro choice for day to day needs, I'm a big fan of NixOS. Setup your whole system with a config file, track it with a VCS and you have an extremely consistent and flexible OS that let's you build nearly any environment you want without messing with the rest of your system.

Why leave arch? Its an incredibly good distro (I did leave it for gentoo but I regret it)

Why not stay on arch? I doubt the experience with VMS will differ between distros, just try it out. And as others have mentioned if your concern is anti cheat than vms might not work since some anti cheats can detect them. If it is not anti cheat than any distro will do, since pretty much anything not anti cheat is playable through proton these days. Another thing to consider is your GPU, keep in mind that if you want to use it for gaming in a VM you need to make a passthrough and you won't be able to use it for your Linux desktop (I think at least, there might be a way to unload the GPU at runtime, but it's probably complicated)

Pop!_OS because of recent Red Hat controversie

I have a Pop_OS! and enabled Wayland just for fun on AMD gpu and everything works as expected.

I've tried every major distro and settled on Arch to receive the latest updates as soon as they exist. Its been pretty solid. But if I had to choose another distro I would choose Fedora, BUT... Red Hat has been a complete asshole, and I'm not supporting their shit.

Sorry VMs won't work in your situation. Check out Lutris for your games.

I actually have Fedora installed on my desktop, and Pop_OS installed on my laptop! I've always been a big fan of the RedHat way of doing things (Yum / DNF & RPMs, the fs organization, etc), but I've gotta say, I really prefer the Pop!_OS user experience when I'm in the GUI.

As others have said, it probably doesn't matter which one you use if your primary purpose is gaming. They'll both run Steam's proton engine just fine. If you're looking for COD, specifically, you're likely going to run into some issues; ProtonDB says that support for those games is not perfect. But a lot of games will work just as well on linux as they do on Windows with it.

I have used many Linux distros, Old-school RedHat (floppy days) Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, etc. I used to like messing around with the kernel and configs, etc. Now I just want something that works so that I can get to work. I installed Pop_OS on an old Microsoft Surface about 3 weeks ago and I have been very impressed. It was simple to install, has a pleasing interface design, and no bloat software. I'm going to keep using it for my desktop and highly recommend it.

I would say pop due to fedora getting caught up in the all drama surrounding red har right now

I recently moved from win 10 to Pop os for work related stuff, also I have arch on another ,,free time pc,, and Mint on my old home server-ish pc.

Pop is pretty good, all necessary stuff is preinstalled, I like how it works out of the box. Games run smoothly, not as smooth as on win but I can give up 5 fps for not being MS(lave)

Mint has more preinstalled packages, feels more bulky but runs ,,smoother,, on old laptop. Also the ui is more like windows

I've been happily running Fedora Workstation for about 2 years on several devices and desktop environments. Up until the RedHat controversy, I would recommend Fedora. But you should probably try Pop!_OS first. It seems to be easier to use and Ubuntu compatible.

I've been running Pop since 2018 (I think?) and have had few issues. It currently pinned to the LTS of Ubuntu while they focus on their home grown Cosmic DE. They still update Kernel/Mesa versions though. Having never really "distro hopped" I put Fedora on a couple of machines when upgrading a couple months ago. I 90% can't tell the difference. The new Gnome stuff is nice, and Wayland by default is nice. I'd say it's hard to go wrong with either. Though Arch is more of an "enthusiast" Linux in my mind. Like something you'd have strong opinions about. Any particular reason to move away from it?