Welcome back and interesting to hear you made the switch to Linux. I use Linux Mint, mainly because I saved a lot of older machines for folks who don't or can't fiddle around with an OS and just need the thing to work out of the box. Arch is a better distro for folks that like to fine tune their machines. For gaming you certainly made things harder on yourself by using Linux, but on the other hand; by building it yourself, they can't ever take it away from you or dictate when an update shuts everything down. Regardless what distro You Use, Linux provides a level of independence that is hard to give up once you are used to it.
RE: Back from the dead... Tron the Techie!