That shouldn’t be a problem, both Gnome and KDE gave decent accessibility features as far as I’m aware. Or at the very least, it’s got zoom, and the cursor can easily be changed to something of your liking. I think KDE’s also got the macOS “shake cursor to make it extra large so you can spot it” available.

I’m more concerned about

I also only have some 2 hours a week for videogames. I can’t afford the time to tinker, after the transition and setup period.

That’s not a lot of time, and if you’d rather not spend it tinkering I would stick with Windows.

I would at least make it a dual boot setup, so you can switch between Windows and Linux as needed. Don’t have time to tinker? Just do it in Windows until you have time.

KDE Plasma is the only desktop with a functional screen reader on Wayland and even then its limited. Other than that, KDE has a magnifying glass setting bound to Super + +/-/0 you can enable.

If you really are using your PC exclusively for gaming and do everything else on your Mac, I wouldn’t bother.

I’m a fairly big Linux advocate, but when it comes to accessibility, there’s still a way to go in Linux. And some form of customization still requires some tinkering. Linux gaming specially isn’t yet as seamless and easy as in Windows just yet. But, I really hope this changes one day.

I don’t have experience with visual impairment, so take my answer with a grain of salt, however it seems that KDE has all the features you need. Plus it’s super customizable, so you could set it up to essentially emulate the MacOS desktop.

Others have already commented on the accessibility stuff, and Xbox game pass.

I’ll add that if you do give it a go, I recommend heroic launcher for managing Epic and GOG games.

It is able to handle installation, as well as running stuff with the wine/proton compatibility layer, for games that need it.

In addition to what others are saying, there is a lemmy for people that moved from r/blind: https://rblind.com It has a small number of active users, but perhaps you might get some help there. You could perhaps ask in their main community, [email protected].

KDE has a good zoom feature built in, however it keeps the mouse centered which is good for doing precise graphical thing, but maybe not the best for gaming. It’s good for reading if you hold your mouse still. You can absolutely find or make a green cursor. Some guy here said gaming on Linux is janky but honestly I’ve been super impressed for the past year I’ve used it. I only had one game that wouldn’t run out of the box so far and got it running by installing some Microsoft VC runtime or something. Everything else just starts runs without issue. Edit: runs without issue in steam.

As someone who recently switched to Linux and doesn’t like to tinker much and doesn’t have very deep knowledge of Linux, I’ll share my experience. Whether you ultimately try or not is up to you.

Your requirements for accessibility suggests you should look into a distro with KDE Plasma as many said already. It is an extremely flexible and customizable DE.

I personally started with Mint and ended up somewhat wedging KDE in it because I didn’t like how cinnamon was handling multiple monitors. It worked but was a little rough around the edges in that setup, as it should be expected with a distro running a DE it wasn’t meant to. If you don’t mess with the DE however I’ve found Mint to be super easy and approachable. But ultimately it might not be what you need.

After doing a lot of research and comparisons I then switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with native KDE plasma. A few things took a little extra tinkering and learning to get them to work but after that it became the setup I am happy to stick with for a long while.

I have no experience with them but KUbuntu and Fedora Plasma Spin might be also good alternatives to look for.

Running games is very easy through stream and still relatively easy with Bottles, which is rather easy and straightforward to lean to use. As long as you have the right video drivers installed. I have an NVidia card which made it a little more complicated but I made it work still. My understanding is that this shouldn’t be any issues with AMD cards right out of the box.

Ultimately it will require you to learn a little here and there whenever you come across something you don’t know. But as someone who only has an extremely shallow understanding of how the OS works and basic common console commands I have found no problem so complicated that I couldn’t handle with a quick web search.

Despite many people in this thread saying KDE, GNOME has been recently been financed to work on accessibility with the STF fund contract work, so major advancements in accessibility are likely to hit them first. They are also looking into getting more contract financing for it. KDE might be fairly equal right now, but I foresee GNOME getting more stuff sooner. Especially in regards to screen readers and just general app accessibility with changes to Libadwaita.

KDE offers full screen zoom out of the box with Windows Key+ and Windows Key-
It also lets you choose a huge green cursor.
Gnome doesn’t have either of this, and don’t even bother looking at any other DEs. In general, accessibility on Linux is really, really, really not great.

I totally can’t help with the visual impairment, and I’m sorry about that. My sister is mostly blind, but not a gamer.

I have been able to play Steam games on Ubuntu and thus far haven’t had any problems, but I haven’t stressed my system with AAA games, either, because I typically play those on console. That’s all I’ve got, sorry. Good luck!

A distribution revolving around KDE might have what you are looking for.

Yet, in this particular situation, you might be better off using Windows if it only revolves around gaming.

Sometimes, it is better to take the path of least resistance.

I’d recommend Ubuntu mostly because it’s going to be the easiest to get working. I recently started playing with Proton on Ubuntu, and it was surprisingly painless. There’s been a lot of improvement over the past few years.

Take a look at https://www.protondb.com/ and search for your games. It’ll let you know how difficult they are to get working and give you tips on helping them run.

Here’s the visual impairments page for stock Ubuntu:

https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/a11y.html.en#vision

There’s stock magnifier support. It’s not great to be honest, but it does allow you to enable crosshairs that will make it easy to find your cursor.

A little more searching found Magnus which might be a better option.

It’s also pretty trivial to install gnome tweaks https://itsfoss.com/gnome-tweak-tool/ and install custom theme elements like high contrast icons and cursors that can help.

Honestly, if you don’t have the time to tinker and learn the system you’d probably have a pretty bad time with Linux.

Pretty much regardless of distro or DE, you are going to find games that either outright will fail to run or will require some tinkering and additional troubleshooting on your part to get them to run. Nvidia GPU support, while improving, is still pretty lackluster. Especially if you want things like raytracing or DLSS.

Also, it’ll be an entirely new OS, with its own learning curve just to figure out how to do basic things.

If you only have two hours a week to game and you want to be able to just jump into a game, know that it’s going to work, and not worry about it, I wouldn’t even say stick with Windows. I’d say stick with game consoles. All of the current gen consoles have some pretty good accessibility features for people who visually impaired.

All of that said, if you still wanted to try out a Linux distro, since your main focus is gaming, I’d recommend Bazzite. It’s generally pretty stable, is very easy to rollback if an update breaks something, and has a version that is preconfigured for nvidia gpus. In its installer you can choose your DE, I’d say go with KDE, since it has all of the accessibility features you listed, you’d just need to enable them in settings.

As much as I want to speak in favour of Linux.

It’s just not ready for this situation combined with gaming. Currently you’re required to tinker with each game to get them to work well. I’d suggest revisiting this in ten years.

Many games do work out of the box on steam. However, features like ray tracing and HDR can be touchy. And I’m not confident screen reader software will play nicely.

Epic Games and Game Pass do not work without much tinkering (The game pass streaming feature might work well but I’ve not tried it myself.) and you’ll likely need to stay on top of that as each update could potentially break it.

Outside of games it’s ready for a wide spectrum of accessibility needs and could potentially be a better experience than windows.