Supports both programming and gaming
Both is super uncritical.
You can install Steam as Flatpak without any real or major issues nowadays and thanks to Proton you can basically play any games except those that use Windows-specific ring 0 spyware as their DRM or anti-cheat mechanism. Pro-Flatpak: You don’t need to deal with 32-bit libs dependency hell.
Same with programing. The relevant compilers are all available for pretty much all common distributions. Same with the common scripting interpreters as well as all common IDEs.
but I’m considering moving it to a VM if the performance impact is manageable
Depending on your VM solution you can usually pass-through CPU and/or GPU and have nearly the same performance as on bare metal.
but am open to exploring new options.
This might be a bold move, but have you considered Arch Linux? You need to do most things by yourself, but the wiki is one of the best and most complete and extensive distribution-specific Linux wikis available. So if you’re willing to read instructions and learn new things, why not give it a try? (Disclosure: Arch is my daily driver since 2008 on desktops, laptops and homeservers).
Have you tried what the message tells you?