Thank you to everyone’s support. I did not expect as much support as you all provided. I’m happy to announce a huge success! Ubuntu is installed, I’ve overcome several hurdles, and have a few more to go. I’ll try to post in next week to summarize my progress and challenges.

If you use Steam for gaming, then probably most games will work either directly or through a specific Proton version (you can set this in Steam). Games that won’t run are most 3rd-party launcher games and games that intentionally use ring 0 spyware.

Something to note for the future, never install windows after Linux, even they are on different drives. Windows boot manager is very invasive, it likely will overwrite your Linux boot manager.

Gaming is the only area where things might get tricky at all, every other area will pretty much just be a matter of getting used to different UIs.

Whether or not you find it sufficient for your gaming needs depends mostly on what types of games you play. If you’re always playing just the newest AAA titles, you might have some trouble, but there are a whole shitload of great titles that work perfectly on linux, and more are being added/ported every day.

As far as distro goes, I think Mint is a good choice for what you describe, you could also try one of the gaming specific distros, but my understanding is that those are generally overkill unless you’re making a gaming box

The biggest problem you’ll encounter with mint in particular is that multiple monitor support can be… hit or miss, other than that, gaming on Linux has been very good for a while now and it’s only getting better. Unless you are really into valorant or destiny 2, pretty much all of your games on steam, epic games and all other stores should just work

For the last two, it will more than enough. Gaming tho, it depends. If you wants emulator, Linux is THE emulator OS. For Windows game tho, if you are planning to play older game, Linux is better than Windows. Period. For newer games, like ‘just-release-game’, it is not ideal. Free to play multiplayer games, especially outside of Steam/Valve, forget it.

My main needs are gaming

Most gaming needs, you’ll have to check protondb to see if you’d be comfortable not being able to play certain games. (games not on steam, you can look to Lutris for community made installers)
While Gold and Silver means games require slight setup (setup is usually explained by user-reports), Platinum means you’re good out of the box, Borked means no chance, you especially want to watch out if your game has an Anti-Cheat (and read the latest user-reports on the game if you’re truly desperate to see if things changed in the last week, like sometimes something like Gundam Evolution quietly enables the linux option in EasyAntiCheat)
If you have a steamaccount, you can log in to get the list of games that you already own on that account to easily see their ratings

local AI

Guides are straightforward, you just have to worry about whether you have nvidia or amd

browser stuff

no issues

I started almost 2 years ago with PopOS. Today I still use it on my brand new PC too where I play games and do stuff.

Mint is pretty lightweight so I’d almost argue that you have room to install a heavier distro if your PC is fairly high spec’d.

I recommend to Install windows on its own drive. I had Windows one time do something to the EFI partition and I wasn’t able to boot linux after. I have heard of people having a separate EFI partitions for linux and windows to avoid this problem.

This is the way.

Unfortunately, if you don’t already know the answers it’s more a question of experience before you’ll understand them.

When I started with Ubuntu I couldn’t do dualboot, so it was hard. It got better with each update, but my beloved Gnome2 desktop was threatened and Ubuntu went on to Unity - KDE sucked, so I jumped over to Linux Mint with Cinnamon desktop.

Whilst it was great, I had terrible issues getting software - PPA’s are often suited to Ubuntu and not Mint… so in the end I tried installing Arch, failed twice, then got a Manjaro (Cinnamon) ISO and tried that for a few days, got some snapshots (rsync to my HDD) and then figured it’s not a big deal to install KDE, as it’s easy enough to go back.

KDE was so much better by then (about 5 years back) that I’m stuck with Manjaro KDE - having access to the AUR to install stuff is awesome, and flatpaks work at the flick of a settings switch too.

Dual-booting gives you the luxury of (if you wanna play Genshin Impact) having the option to boot into your game OS but also the ability to install games on your Linux OS and decide which one runs best on your hardware.

Everyone has such varied ‘needs’ that your question is impossible to answer - you must just suck it and see.

you should be fine. gaming is dead simple with steam + proton

if you wanna torrent games, it’ll be a bit more involved but still doable

the AI stuff should work just fine, you just wanna make sure you go for a distro with good hardware support

Gaming on Linux is absolutely possible, but you have to have the right mindset for it. Put it in its own category. There are games that work on XBOX, there are games that work on PS4, there are Games that work on Windows, there are games that work on Linux. There is significant overlap between all of these, with many games working on all the platforms. Some games work better on some platforms than they do on others.

If you go at this with the mindset that you are going to play all your favorite Windows games on Linux, you will be as disappointied as if you got a PS5 to play Zelda and Animal Crossing. But if you instead go into it with the mindset “this is a gaming platform with thousands of games I can play on it, I’ll play the games that work on this platform” you will find that gaming on Linux is a perfectly adequate gaming platform.

Gaming depends on your game choice. It gets better every year, but gaming is always the category that Windows slightly wins on. Everything else is dramatically easier in linux.

Ubuntu (or variants) is always a solid option. Apt is just the best (imo) packaging system, and since Ubuntu is #1 in popularity, you’re more likely to get support for issues there than any other linux variant.

Dual-boot is the way to go TBH, especially with a NVME drive, even if you land on Linux as your daily driver

Reboot and switching OS if needed for compatibility is only a 30 second or less process.