I really hope Linux can stop being a miserable piece of incompatible shit
I swapped my desktop to Linux Mint about a year ago and it has been surprisingly great. My windows exclusive financial software runs via "Bottles" with no tweaking, and the games I actually play all worked with minimal effort except for Civ3, which was a giant pain in the ass and ended up going in a VM instead.
The installation was painless. Windows 11 required I supply a driver to see the SSD, Mint did not. It was literally easier than installing windows. All my hardware was identified, including NVidia, bluetooth, and wifi adapter. After install I loaded steam, heroic (for GoG and Epic), bottles, installed my financial software in a bottle, and was back to using my computer in a few hours. Mint looks very much like Windows and provides a GUI for most things you will want. It has a "software center" that kind of acts like the Microsoft store, except that everything is free. This is where I grabbed media players, torrent client, etc from.
Mint is very customizable, and unless you bolt on something weird it can be done with the GUI. My workflow is much less of a pain now; specifically the 'workspaces' feature lets me rapidly flip between multiple different desktop sets with a keystroke, and each is configured for a different part of that workflow, so I no longer have to juggle windows like I used to.
If you use adobe or certain games with anti-cheat it won't work for you, but if not it might well be worth a day on a weekend to try installing it on a clean SSD. Worst case you can format the SSD and use it as a backup target for your windows install.
I tried putting it on a VM a couple weeks back and immediately ran into driver issues followed by Wine shitting the bed while trying to install an older game. I want Linux to be as painless as you make it sound, but even your description belies the troubles it has just underneath its surface. An operating system is supposed to get the hell out of my way, but Linux's default position is to obstruct the user's path. It might be better, but it's still a shitshow.
I never tried it in a VM, no idea about issues there. Mint's installer is also a live USB, so you can just boot it on your real hardware and see if it recognizes it all without actually committing to anything. Would probably not be suitable to test any games out but would at least definitively answer the drivers question.
I swapped my desktop to Linux Mint about a year ago and it has been surprisingly great. My windows exclusive financial software runs via "Bottles" with no tweaking, and the games I actually play all worked with minimal effort except for Civ3, which was a giant pain in the ass and ended up going in a VM instead.
The installation was painless. Windows 11 required I supply a driver to see the SSD, Mint did not. It was literally easier than installing windows. All my hardware was identified, including NVidia, bluetooth, and wifi adapter. After install I loaded steam, heroic (for GoG and Epic), bottles, installed my financial software in a bottle, and was back to using my computer in a few hours. Mint looks very much like Windows and provides a GUI for most things you will want. It has a "software center" that kind of acts like the Microsoft store, except that everything is free. This is where I grabbed media players, torrent client, etc from.
Mint is very customizable, and unless you bolt on something weird it can be done with the GUI. My workflow is much less of a pain now; specifically the 'workspaces' feature lets me rapidly flip between multiple different desktop sets with a keystroke, and each is configured for a different part of that workflow, so I no longer have to juggle windows like I used to.
If you use adobe or certain games with anti-cheat it won't work for you, but if not it might well be worth a day on a weekend to try installing it on a clean SSD. Worst case you can format the SSD and use it as a backup target for your windows install.
I tried putting it on a VM a couple weeks back and immediately ran into driver issues followed by Wine shitting the bed while trying to install an older game. I want Linux to be as painless as you make it sound, but even your description belies the troubles it has just underneath its surface. An operating system is supposed to get the hell out of my way, but Linux's default position is to obstruct the user's path. It might be better, but it's still a shitshow.
I never tried it in a VM, no idea about issues there. Mint's installer is also a live USB, so you can just boot it on your real hardware and see if it recognizes it all without actually committing to anything. Would probably not be suitable to test any games out but would at least definitively answer the drivers question.