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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

I installed a dual boot Win/Linux Mint back in 2016, over the next 5 years, I believe I booted Windows twice. The only issue I ever had was some Excel macros from work weren't compatible with LibreOffice Calc. I ended up installing Office using Wine as a workaround. When I upgraded to Mint 21.1, I removed the dual boot. Linux just works. And works. And works.

If you're planning on doing GPU-accelerated AI stuff make sure to use a Linux distribution that your AI tools of choice support. So go look at the installation/HOWTO page for whatever AI tools you're planning on using and take a look at the installation instructions. If it has instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (the most common one I've seen) make sure to use that.

Anecdote: The AMD GPU "Pro" drivers don't really work quite right on the latest version of Ubuntu at the moment (well, I couldn't get them to work) and they're required for certain types of AI acceleration.

I first ran xUbuntu as a main on a Chromebook that loaded it as a ChrUbuntu install so that I could use Linux on something dedicated and full time while also keeping my desktop intact.

Once I got used to the workings of the system, I came to prefer it in every way.

Want vlc? Install it from the software center gui or use apt. No need to download the exe from a shady download reposting site. Same for every equivalent app that was (exactly or close enough) available for Windows. Never had to worry about the integrity of the apps in the repositories.

Then the Windows 7 updates happened. Forced telemetry, Win10 installer preloaded. An accident later and Win10 was on my system. It pissed me off so much that I wiped the SSD and installed xUbuntu on my desktop. Had already been running it on the Chromebook for a few years so the switch was painless. Didn't miss the games I could no longer play, not in the least, just for the added stability (no random restarts due to updated, especially not when rendering a multi day job) and ease of being able to install nearly everything I wanted from the repos.

I grew up on windows. Used dos, win 3.0 through NT4 to 2000 to 7...

I wish I had started using Linux sooner. It's just easier.

Be careful when dual booting. I've had to manually rebuild my partition tables way too many times because Windows doesn't like to play nice. That was dual booting from the same disk though so ymmv with a dedicated nvme.

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.

If you like Linux use Linux and make it your home. But expecting gaming to be as easy as Windows just isn’t going to happen.

Nothing wrong with it. Here's a website to help you choose the distro: https://distrochooser.de/

Personally, for gaming, I'd recomment Mint or Ubuntu. Probably your hardware will be supported. There's also Pop!OS, which seems to be completely gaming related as well as SteamOS, but I've never used them.

depending on your needs try WSL2 instead of dual booting. I've been linux or macos for quite a while in daily work as a programmer and kinda dig on WSL2 in Windows, particularly Win11 with the improved terminal. add Docker in the mix and there's nothing you can't do in that kind of environment that you'd be looking to do in a dedicated Linux boot...again dependin on what youre doing i guess.

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.

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

If steam is primary for gaming, it has an option to run all your games on Linux via proton, so look into that. For blizzard games, Lutris works well. I’ve had the least hassle with getting it work on Fedora and (surprisingly) Arch Linux.

However, if using Lutris, things tend to be a lot easier with an AMD card than an nVidia card.

On my arch pc, I have yet to run into any issues with pc gaming or anything else. But I’d recommend using fedora kde for simplicity sake.

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 over write your Linux boot manager.

i dual boot Ubuntu and Windows 10.

Havent had issues much, even done upgrades of each. Ubuntu updates do sometimes trip out Bitlocker and prompt for a recovery key.

I have the same use case. Ubuntu for most things. Windows for gaming only.

I even do this with an eGPU. Ubuntu does well with it using X11 (not wayland) but requires reboots to connect/disconnect the pcie channels. Windows is better at it but struggles with USB enumerations on occaison.

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.

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

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

My only serious gaming experience on Linux is with Steam Deck and its SteamOS which is based on Arch Linux. So I cannot really make a firm recommendation. But for local AI and browsing, I have been using Ubuntu (plus its derived distros). I think it is a good starting point for anyone switching from Windows.

Garuda Linux and then VanillaOS when Orchid is out and you're a little more familiar with the system. :)

Ubuntu and Mint should be fine for all that. I prefer Manjaro for being light weight and generally having better awareness of what the userbase wants compared to Ubuntu or Mint. But both should be fine.