Technology

You can do a lot with chocolatey or winget, but they can't update system software. Linux package management is just better.

Steam + Proton works for most games, but there are still rough edges that you need to be prepared to deal with. In my experience, it's typically older titles and games that use anti-cheat that have the most trouble. Most of the time it just works, I even ran the Battle.net installer as an external Steam game with Proton enabled and was able to play Blizzard titles right away.

The biggest gap IMO is VR. If you have a VR headset that you use on your desktop and it's important to you, stay on Windows. There is no realistic solution for VR integration in Linux yet. There are ways that you can kinda get something to work with ALVR, but it's incredibly janky and no dev will support it. There are rumors Steam Link is being ported to Linux, nothing official yet though.

On balance, I'm incredibly happy with Mint since I switched last year. However, I do a decent amount of personal software development, and I've used Linux for 2 decades as a professional developer. I wouldn't say the average Windows gamer would be happy dealing with the rough spots quite yet, but it's like 95% of the way there these days. Linux has really grown up a lot in the last few years.

This is a great time to switch. I have Bazzite on a 2015 laptop and a Steam Deck with SteamOS, and I'm working on migrating my main gaming rig. 95% of my games run well, and the few that don't are often tiny indie projects. Most general use apps have Linux equivalents or Linux versions.

My recommendation is to try a few distros in VMs and see if you can set them up how you'd do it for real. Then, try out a few Live ISOs to identify any glaringly obvious hardware compatibility issues you might need to solve (rare, but it happens).

Try the common recommendations like Mint or Pop!_OS, and check out gaming-focused ones like Bazzite and Garuda.

I switched to Linux Mint a couple months ago and use Steam a lot. I've tried at least 10 games and all worked perfectly.

But I don't do competitive multiplayer. Those are more likely to have issues with anti-cheats. Although I did try Hell Let Loose and Helldivers very successfully and those are both major online titles.

Check https://protondb.com if you're worried about a specific game's compatibility. I've had silver rated games work perfectly though.

Edit: Apps - Photo editing and 3D CAD are the main areas I've struggled with on Linux. There's no good Adobe equivalent, and no good Fusion 360 equivalent. Free CAD exists, but that can gently fuck off.

Not the person you asked to but my gaming experience has been stellar. If you use Steam you don't have to do anything, it all works out of the box. If you don't play those multiplayer games with kernel level anti cheats you'll be fine.

I was expecting a bad time and was extremely impressed. Gaming in Linux is amazing.

I have a dual boot, mint and Bazzite. Bazzite is great for gaming

Things with kernel anti-cheat aren't going to work unless they have a Linux version. So no Helldivers, Valorant, Apex Legends, etc.

Other than that, I have yet to find a game that doesn't work under Proton. They'll tell you it's Windows-only until you go into the game's steam compatibility settings and set it to Proton Experimental and then it just installs and runs no problem. Even things I didn't really expect to work, I booted and played Trepang2 under Proton just last night, not a problem in sight.