Even if the game is a repack, you can add the installer EXE to Steam and it’ll run with Proton Experimental or GE, choose the install location, then add the resulting, unpacked EXE to Steam and it’ll run just fine.

I’m not a fan of Gnome either but Pop was the most stable distro I found for an Nvidia card.

This Gnome extension let’s you move everything down to the bottom panel.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/

I’ve had good luck using Pop!_OS to game on Nvidia systems. Can’t speak specifically for those two games, but several other games that gave me trouble on other distros worked smoothly on Pop.