I’ve been using Manjaro gnome specifically for Gnome 3.36, because something changes in 3.38 which causes my games (primarily world of warcraft under Lutris/wine/wine-staging) to stutter. I’ve tried gnome under fedora, pure arch (and several derivatives like arco/endeavour), ubuntu, debian, and OS Tumbleweed, all at 3.38 and all with the same issue.
The weird part is that I have an FPS counter in WoW and it shows upwards of 120 fps, but it’s still stuttering as if it’s running <60. I’ve tried everything I can think of, across multiple distributions, kernels and nvidia driver versions, but the only thing that seems to work is sticking with Gnome 3.36. Oddly enough, when I upgrade to the 3.38 stack and use Budgie desktop, everything works flawlessly, so it seems to be something specific to gnome-shell 3.38. I’ve even tried the gnome-shell-performance and mutter-performance packages from the aur on 3.38, but it’s still stuttering.
I would like to stick with gnome, though, because of Material Shell, which is an amazing extension. Budgie has window-shuffler-control, but it’s nowhere near as good as material shell. KDE worked for a while, but now the game refuses to launch when you disable the compositor (only with latest .2 update of plasma)…but nothing really comparable to Material Shell there, either.