The sluggishness you experienced has a lot to do with Ubuntu itself. At its base it’s a very good OS, but canonical is messing up on the details.
Ubuntu derivatives like Linux Mint or PopOS have spent a lot of time resolving this. They perform very well for most and have got excellent stability because their software stack is a little older.
For gaming, fedora is probably the base OS that most prefer at the moment. It’s at a good balance point of stability the latest tech.
The other option if you want to go more bleeding edge is Manjaro, but expect some things to break on occasion.
I wish distro’s would combine efforts much more so we have a better desktop experience. Do we really need 15 window managers when we could have 2 or 3 much better ones.
Unify to a single package manager, they are all functionally the same.
Standardize on flatpacks and abandon snaps and appimage