Linux

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.

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.

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...

In my opinion in modern computing I'd rather be on a "faster" releasing distro such as Fedora, Arch Linux. Modern hardware depends constant patches to the kernel to keep up with new sleep management changes and improvements to the GPU stack etc.

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

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.

Gaming is the only area where things might get tricky at all, every other area will pretty much just be a matter of getting used to different UIs.

Whether or not you find it sufficient for your gaming needs depends mostly on what types of games you play. If you're always playing just the newest AAA titles, you might have some trouble, but there are a whole shitload of great titles that work perfectly on linux, and more are being added/ported every day.

As far as distro goes, I think Mint is a good choice for what you describe, you could also try one of the gaming specific distros, but my understanding is that those are generally overkill unless you're making a gaming box

My main needs are gaming

Most gaming needs, you'll have to check protondb to see if you'd be comfortable not being able to play certain games. (games not on steam, you can look to Lutris for community made installers)
While Gold and Silver means games require slight setup (setup is usually explained by user-reports), Platinum means you're good out of the box, Borked means no chance, you especially want to watch out if your game has an Anti-Cheat (and read the latest user-reports on the game if you're truly desperate to see if things changed in the last week, like sometimes something like Gundam Evolution quietly enables the linux option in EasyAntiCheat)
If you have a steamaccount, you can log in to get the list of games that you already own on that account to easily see their ratings

local AI

Guides are straightforward, you just have to worry about whether you have nvidia or amd

browser stuff

no issues

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.

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.

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

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/

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

AI stuff works great on Linux (have personally run stable diffusion and large language models). Gaming is generally good but some games don't work on the platform (notably rainbow six, and valorant.)

Looks good enough for me. Even simply a browser + a single board computer + any "standard" Linux installation can be good enough as is for gaming/"browser stuff" if you don't mind limiting your gaming collection to a handful few of... 200(?) that changes every now and then by your gaming overlords. And yes, I'm talking about XCloud.

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 personally would recommend giving Fedora a shot

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 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.

I did just that. As far as I remember at the start I had the urge to use Windows since I got addicted to its interface and functioning after those 15+ years, but building my habit into booting linux (I recommend to set linux to boot by default) made my Windows dependence absolute.

Gaming on linux with Steam is smooth (You need to enable to use proton on all non native games and You are good to go). You can check ProtonDB to see how Your games perform. The only problem is that many online titles with anticheat do not work (mostly due to developers refusing to enable an option to allow proton to run them)

I do not do AI, but at least I know that there's a simple gnome program 'Imaginer' which lets You use stable diffusion and openai so definitely check if that would satisfy Your needs.

You can go Mint, a lot of people recommend it. Trust me as a Fedora fanboy.

If You have an nvidia card (which by steam's statistics I have ~80% chance to say that You have) You should install proprietary drivers after the OS installation process (Unless Mint offers to do it when installing os, but i do not know that).

If You have more questions please do ask them, I will be more than happy to help!

I'd suggest Pop!_OS (Ubuntu-based) or Manjaro (Arch-based) as easy-to-pick-up distros with good gaming support out-of-the-box. Mint is nice for beginners as well but I have no idea if you need to tinker to get gaming working well.

I made the permanent switch from Windows four years ago. First to elementary OS but I found it severely lacking for gaming purposes and also for my power user needs. After a year of cursing and banging my head against the wall I switched to Pop!_OS for a couple of years. It was pretty great for everything I needed, including gaming. Except that I had constant problems with updating the proprietary Nvidia drivers to the point I once had to reinstall the entire OS to get my display to show up again. And also a lot of audio problems. It was a huge learning experience though!

I decided to try out Manjaro last summer and have been very happy with it since! I only booted back to Pop twice (just to check and copy some configs) before wiping its drive clean and never looking back. Pretty much everything just seems to work, especially gaming and the Nvidia drivers!