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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I use debian for gaming and light LLM workloads and it’s been serving me quite well. Really like KDE.

Mint user here, did the switch years ago and never came back. Steam with Proton makes gaming easy, and for games not on Steam, you can look at Lutris (played WoW like that with no problems).

My only experience with AI is tensorflow, but interfacing with Nvidia cards is easier on Linux than Windows, since I ended up needing to use WSL anyway.

The only browser stuff that might get annoying is Pearson exams, if you ever need to do any. They really don’t like Linux users.

I did just that. As far as I remember at the start I had the urge to use Windows since I got addicted to its interface and functioning after those 15+ years, but building my habit into booting linux (I recommend to set linux to boot by default) made my Windows dependence absolute.

Gaming on linux with Steam is smooth (You need to enable to use proton on all non native games and You are good to go). You can check ProtonDB to see how Your games perform. The only problem is that many online titles with anticheat do not work (mostly due to developers refusing to enable an option to allow proton to run them)

I do not do AI, but at least I know that there’s a simple gnome program ‘Imaginer’ which lets You use stable diffusion and openai so definitely check if that would satisfy Your needs.

You can go Mint, a lot of people recommend it. Trust me as a Fedora fanboy.

If You have an nvidia card (which by steam’s statistics I have ~80% chance to say that You have) You should install proprietary drivers after the OS installation process (Unless Mint offers to do it when installing os, but i do not know that).

If You have more questions please do ask them, I will be more than happy to help!

Looks good enough for me. Even simply a browser + a single board computer + any “standard” Linux installation can be good enough as is for gaming/“browser stuff” if you don’t mind limiting your gaming collection to a handful few of… 200(?) that changes every now and then by your gaming overlords. And yes, I’m talking about XCloud.

I’ve been using Linux as a daily driver for a couple decades. Home and work (before retirement). Unless your work has some fucked up Windows-only requirement, there is no reason Linux won’t meet your needs.

I did a similar thing when starting out with KDE neon, but I found having windows annoying as it would keep breaking Linux’s bootloader (grub) randomly because Microsoft is an asshole.

On my laptop, I ended up removing the windows disk altogether, and it’s a much nicer experience.

Dual boot might be necessary at first, but if you can just boot Linux and use a windows vm on it, that would probably be a better idea.

You wont know for sure until you try. the main sticking point for gaming on linux is anti-cheat, so if you play a lot of games with that then you may run into some trouble. otherwise ProtonDB is your friend. Most games these days are pretty easy to get up and running.

A lot of AI tools are developed on linux anyway so you shouldn’t encounter too many problems there.

Browsers are no problem at all. I recommend Firefox

I’d suggest Pop!_OS (Ubuntu-based) or Manjaro (Arch-based) as easy-to-pick-up distros with good gaming support out-of-the-box. Mint is nice for beginners as well but I have no idea if you need to tinker to get gaming working well.

I made the permanent switch from Windows four years ago. First to elementary OS but I found it severely lacking for gaming purposes and also for my power user needs. After a year of cursing and banging my head against the wall I switched to Pop!_OS for a couple of years. It was pretty great for everything I needed, including gaming. Except that I had constant problems with updating the proprietary Nvidia drivers to the point I once had to reinstall the entire OS to get my display to show up again. And also a lot of audio problems. It was a huge learning experience though!

I decided to try out Manjaro last summer and have been very happy with it since! I only booted back to Pop twice (just to check and copy some configs) before wiping its drive clean and never looking back. Pretty much everything just seems to work, especially gaming and the Nvidia drivers!

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