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.