Distro Suggestions

It's a little more of a setup but you could try endeavour. It's pretty lightweight and performant, they have every kind of DE imaginable to install during the setup.

Linux Mint Debian Edition is very lightweight and easy to use.

I had a good experiences with nobrara. For non gamers it is a bit bloated, but everything worked out of the box or after just one reboot. https://nobaraproject.org/

Try one of the lightweight Ubuntu distros: Lubuntu or Xubuntu.

Linux mint has delivered me a consistent experience on the verge of boring (Good for an OS) with great driver support and minimal intervention. I have wandered a long path of distro hopping and can say if you want to screw around, learn linux, and have to care about maintaining it (Like a car or house) try EndeavourOS or other major distros. If you want an OS that works for you without much intervention, give mint a try.

The default Cinnamon DE is quite light, but it also comes with an even lighter XFCE version. I prefer Cinnamon because it just hits the right spot for what I knew computing to be.

For the best Nvidia Optimus experience IMO go with an arch based distro, something like Endeavor OS, and install and configure Optimus Manager. It has a Hybrid Mode which makes it work much like it does on Windows, were you just launch a game and it uses the dedicated GPU. I like it better that way vs having to be switching modes manually.

Here's a guide for it: https://discovery.endeavouros.com/nvidia/optimus-manager-for-nvidia/2021/03/

Have you thought about Garuda Linux. It's a Arch based linux distro with good setup for gaming in mind.

I’ve been playing around with Nobara. Coming from Fedora, I always felt like I didn’t have “everything I needed to run games properly”. Followed a few tutorials on YouTube to set up my Fedora (f36+) box for gaming but that feelining of incompleteness never left. Since installing Nobara, I’ve realized that my “feeling” was absolutely right! Nobara basically installed a bunch of other gaming things I never even knew I needed for basic gaming (codecs, other nvidia software, ProtonUp-QT, etc). Nice easy step through style setup. Using the KDE version and so far, I’m staying with Nobara. Just my opinion.

If you want lightweight, void is pretty good. Not sure about nvidia though.