It sounds like it's time to stop reading and it's time to jump in and get your feet wet!

I think you are seeing contradictory information because this information is all true in different contexts for different users. It doesn't matter what distro you use _if you're trying it out_ and _for most users_, but each of the different distros was created with different goals for different use cases, so some are more suitable than others.

Pick any desktop-oriented distro that has a LiveCD you can try.

It doesn’t matter what distro you use, but also you absolutely should not use that one!! Use that one it’s much better trust me!.

It doesn’t matter what distro you use, the fundamentals are the same, use the distro that best fits your needs out of the box, it’s that simple…
Those with experience may help you via suggestions to try something else more fitting to your use case and hardware.
Those who gatekeep are either inexperienced, trolling, memes btw (arch), or have self-awareness stat zero.

Gaming is good on Linux now, but also it’s super shit and you should keep windows if you want to game

What a complete misrepresentation.
Gaming on Linux is great because of Valve’s Proton, SteamDeck & VKD3D, WINE, DXVK, GloriousEggroll’s Proton GE and many other combined efforts across the ecosystem. It’s just not flawless, that’s why we have ProtonDB, AreWeAntiCheatYet & many other resources.

And for fucks sake please type the whole words when speaking to beginners. How am I supposed to know what a DE, a VM, a CLI, a WM, PM, or all that other stuff is?

What a non-issue…
Have you ever considered this amazing thing called, asking. It takes 2s to clarify : DE VM CLI WM.
PM doesn’t have an established meaning, possibly Power Management but not common enough to be considered established.

Really this whole post is you conflating the differing opinions from diverse people of an entire massive community into the straws you’re grasping at.

~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~

I’d just install something and ignore people until you are more familiar with things. You don’t have to stay with the first distro you install, and you can install many at once and see what fits. Stay away from the complicated ones until you’re further along on your journey.

As for the dual boot thing, Windows had (has?) a habit of blowing out the Linux bootloader if it’s installed on the same physical drive as windows. IDK if this still happens, but when it did it was annoying for someone that isn’t too familiar with how bootloaders work. To be safe, using a second drive for your linux stuff and then just choosing which drive to boot from at your BIOS boot chooser (often accessed by hitting F12 at boot) is the safe way to get around this. Then you aren’t messing with the drive Windows is on at all and there’s no chance for drama if Windows Update decides to do that.

There’s a few good beginner distros that work well enough with nVidia; Ubuntu, PopOS, Mint are all good choices for beginners. EndeavourOS and Manjaro seem to get along with nVidia if you want something Arch based if your inclination heads that way eventually. Glorious Eggroll, one of the main contributors to Proton, the gaming backend Valve is working on, builds a distro called Nobara that has most of the gaming/video tweaks preinstalled on a Fedora base, and in my experience it’s one of the easiest distros to get started with gaming on Linux. PopOS is a Ubuntu-based distro that’s put a lot of effort into being a gaming capable distro as well.

Whatever you choose, realize that Linux is like any other interest on the internet; there’s a lot of people that like to lift themselves up by pushing others down. Ignore the donkeys and do what works for you. If that means using Windows, then I guess that’s what works and that’s fine, too.

Is your version of Windows a Pro? Find out in Settings -> System -> About. If so, you can install the Optional Feature (under Apps, Windows Features in 10 or System -> Optional Featues -> More Windows Features on 11) called Hyper-V.

If you do not have Pro, then install VirtualBox. Either one will let you create a Virtual Machine (VM), which lets you test drive anything as an operating system running as an app in an operating system (Xzibit meme here). From here, I would strongly recommend the mainstream linuxes, which are typically in the “just works” category and support Secure Boot out of the box, which lets you install it alongside Windows. These are:

Ubuntu Linux (preferably Kubuntu for the best Windows-like interface or Lubuntu if your computer is not very powerful)

Ubuntu is old reliable. A lot of Linux users are salty because a major corpo (Canonical) runs Ubuntu, and they’ve made design choices in the past and present that a bunch of Linux users are salty over (particularly by explicitly not supporting the now popular flatpak app format in favor of their own snap format), but reality is, Ubuntu works on just about everything I’ve ever put it on with the least amount (read: none) of dicking around to get it working. Ubuntu and its base, Debian, are very well supported and extremely stable. Most programs with a deb installer are designed for one or the other. Note that unlike Debian, Ubuntu is a bit newer with stuff, but still a bit behind compared to the frontier option below. This is the tradeoff for stability. Less cutting edge.

If flatpak support is more important to you, Linux Mint is a good interim between Ubuntu and Debian. It’s community run, has a very Windows-like simple desktop design, and supports Flatpak natively. However, Mint is behind on the latest shift in Linux backend systems, known as the great Wayland migration, among other things. They’re still working on it.

Fedora Linux (also preferred the KDE Spin, see above)

This is the bleeding edge Linux, maintained by another major corpo, RedHat. A lot of Linux users are salty about Fedora because RedHat is proprietary, and they recently killed off CentOS, a source code clone of RedHat a lot of people relied on, by buying it up and changing it from a clone to a testbed, probably to try and force users onto buying RedHat Enterprise Linux. However, Fedora is very up to date on the latest Linux tech, but is packaged in a very good “least pain to install and run every day” manner. They have very good support, due to being a cutting edge testbed for RedHat Enterprise, and anything that has an rpm package is probably for Fedora or RedHat. They also support flatpak natively, which makes it more likely whatever you want is going to be here. In addition, Fedora runs Wayland (the new, better performant graphics backend), which means it’s already future proofed.

Any other Linux you use will make you jump hoops to get Secure Boot working. I also know that there will be 12,000,000,000 replies of people saying Secure Boot is evil Microsoft conspiracy and stuff and you shouldn’t use it, but you need it for Windows dual boot, and platform security is something that people ignore until it becomes a problem, at which having it in the first place would have prevented the issue, as it’s too late after the fact to address it.

Once you’ve checked out the Linux of your choice in a VM, next is to get a USB stick and use Rufus to make a live boot stick, to see if it works on your PC. From the live stick, you can also install the linux on it.

Note that in many cases, if you’re not using the Linuxes above, you may have to disable Secure Boot, then do some linux magic (it’s different for every linux, which means googling or wiki searching, which is why I am not recommending everyone’s favorite distro, Arch, which is like a pro race car driver telling a person who’s never driven a motor vehicle before “it’s easy to drive a stock car” or “it’s easy to drive an F1 car”) after installation to get it enabled.

As for Windows eating the boot loader in dual boot configuration, this should not happen if you have UEFI, which every computer since Windows 8 is configured to boot with and uses Secure Boot, unless you changed that yourself in the bios or installed on ancient (pre-2012) hardware. What happens is when a boot loader is updated, either in Windows or Linux, it will establish itself as the King of Boot and be the first one to boot. Both boot loaders are still there in the EFI boot partition, but you may occasionally have to go into your UEFI Firmware Settings and change the boot order to your preference.

The reason I am pushing KDE versions is that both the mainest stream Linuxes push GNOME as their default desktop environment (DE). GNOME is nice, but it’s been trying to reinvent the wheel for a solid decade now with a completely unique interface, and coming off Windows, KDE is lighter weight on the system resource-wise and feels more familiar, with the bottom taskbar and start menu on the bottom left layout (you can still move it to another side if you’re one of those people).

The reason I have not recommended Pop!_OS is that they run LTS Ubuntu (which is older but supported for years version), they use a GNOME-like interface, and most importantly, they do not support Secure Boot at all.

From there, have fun. Linux is like a kit car, it’s made of lots of custom parts somehow working together in chaotic harmony.