With a 10 series cards, dx12 performance will be terrible. Nvidia already has issues with dx12 on newer cards but Pascal is beyond worse. You’ll have to enable dx11 on games that support it.

I decided on installing debloated windows for my 1070ti media machine. Plugs into a 4k tv and runs modern games well enough at 1440p on medium.

This is my experience and your mileage may vary. I still use linux (cachyOS) on my main machine with a 3070ti but Nobara or Bazzite are also good as others have mentioned.

Yeah, just remove and grab the deb file instead.

I was under the impression that intel dgpu drivers were in the kernel and part of the mesa library. Not sure what kernel Ubuntu is using but you may want to grab a more recent kernel.

Quick search shows people are using kernel 6.12 and mesa 25 with decent success but not in all games. Could also swap to distro with more recent kernel.

Just don’t install Steam with snap. Many have had issues in the past with it. Either flatpak or grabbing the deb file from Steam