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.

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 overwrite your Linux boot manager.

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. My personal recommendation is to try fedora, as I’ve had a much smoother experience with it…

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

Perhaps look at distros that support gaming put of the box like Nobara or Pop-OS, my personal goto is Manjaro running KDE with Wayland display manager as it feels quite fast and snappy. But being an arch based distro mean you’d have to do a bit of tinkering (Which isn’t really that hard tbh) then you can tell people “BTW I use Arch” heh heh

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.

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.

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.

You can run a hardware probe from the live USB to see how well the distro handles your hardware too
https://linux-hardware.org/

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.

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.

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 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.

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.