At this point graphics driver optimizations have made the steam shader caching feature obsolete. I would recommend disabling it in the steam settings.

True there is no beating the arch wiki

I’d recommend opensuse tumbleweed. I would suggest Debian but it moves too slow (updates) for gaming. I think arch is good but you will have to want to learn a bit more about it. Tumbleweed falls closer to Debian with stability and still near arch as far as frequent updates.

Don’t know if it’s the answer you are looking for but if when you install the game you click add application menu shortcut it will add it to the menu that opens with windows key. I have never personally used desktop shortcuts on gnome since it isn’t included stock.