It’s so much easier than I had anticipated. Funnily enough, the most complicated thing was organizing a 16Gb USB stick to boot because I only had 20 year old ones with 4Gb. On a newly purchased bare AMD PC, I was able to set everything up after work and play games with my buddies the same evening.
I opted for Bazzite and everything ran right out of the box without any additional hardware drivers: gaming mouse, wifi, wireless PS4 controller, printer, NAS, Android phone. The game libraries from Steam, Epic, gog etc. can all be easily connected via Lutris and so far all the games I’ve tried have run. For programs that are only offered for other distributions, I have installed BoxBuddy, where you can create Distroboxes. For most Windows native programs Wine just works.
I had the same experience with Ubuntu many years ago. And I can’t speak for Pop!_OS since I never used it. Most developers only provide commands for Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora on their websites. So they don’t work all the time in derived distros.
At least in Bazzite there is an “App Store” called Bazaar, containing many popular apps as flatpaks --> 1 click install. I generally like using the command line, but it was not necessary at all so far.