@codimp : thank you so much for taking the time to respond ! And so soon after I asked all kinds of questions !
See, links like that are exactly what I wish I knew about, but people who are newbies like me, by definition, don't know about these tools. Thank you so much. My main games are gold or platinum, so I'd be good, I think ; depending on the tweaks in question.

(the version of Photoshop I'm running is um, less than legal... I mostly worry about being able to use my psd files and such)

@ladyteruki @codimp

I don't really have huge gaming needs or drawing software needs, but for the "plug in and work please" part especially if you're used to Windows I think Linux Mint is a good candidate, it has a lot of GUI tools preinstalled to do things, and it usually just works out of the box, I don't really enjoy tinkering and I don't have to do it much with Mint

@Nocta_Senestra @codimp : thanks for your feedback, I'm adding Mint to my list of considered distros ! I actually have heard of Mint before, in the context of Notion.

https://www.linuxfordevices.com/tutorials/install-notion-ubuntu-linux

@ladyteruki @codimp

Hmm I would say most of the reasons are "anti-windows"/anticapitalistic/anti-surveillance, but in a general way, regarding that, it brings me peace of mind, knowing that I'm way less likely to be spied on etc.

I know things won't always work (they mostly do just yeah), but they don't always work on Windows either, and I know that most of my problems on Linux could technically be solved even if I would probably need to spend a lot of time on very tricky ones, while Windows problems are just... obscure... hard to diagnose, hard to fix, ... That's peace of mind too

And also when installing things I can use the distro's repos and stuff and be pretty confident that I'm not installing some utter crap that will ruin my computer, that's also peace of mind

It boots pretty fast and doesn't force me to update I can do it whenever I want that's also nice

@ladyteruki @codimp

Kinda like a gallery of apps yeah (but they're called packaged)

On Mint you have a GUI to install stuff (software manager I think it's called), some of it are "packages" from the distro's repo managed directly by the Mint team (or the Ubuntu team as it's based on Ubuntu), stuff you could also install from the package manager or from the command line with "apt install", some of it are from Flatpack, which is another system that I don't really like but at least it's clearly labelled when it's the case.

@ladyteruki @codimp

Linux is modular in itself, when you install a distro it's more "what starting build do I choose", like you're relying on someone else's opinions on what to pick in a way (how your windows and files manager will look like, what is preinstalled, etc...).

Mint is relatively opinionated in the sense that it preinstalls and configure a lot of things so you don't have to, all the basic stuff you'd need, you'll still need to install stuff like Steam, Gimp, Krita, ...
But you can always change the things it configures if you don't like it.

Some distros like Gentoo are more lax, they install just a base and let you do all the work.

@Nocta_Senestra @codimp : I see. Where Windows is more about giving you SOME settings, but still installs everything by default, Linux lets you pick and choose more so that you don't even install what you don't want... am I getting that right ?

(why are there so many distros >_< no I get it, precisely for that reason, different people want different "opinions" but it's very confusing from a noob's point ov iew)