Just try it on a new hard disk - no need to mess up a working install to try a new one.

I just commited 100% right away. It was not bad at all.

Have you ever used linux before? You can install a distro alongside windows, and choose which to boot.

Why wait? Win10 is not as shitty as Win11, but it's shitty nonetheless. Though I'd still try dual-booting first, just to see if all your hardware is compatible.

The info on the bootloader is wrong. Secure Boot in UEFI is important to understand. The actual bootloader is the largest vulnerable surface area in a modern computer with a fully encrypted drive.

Linux itself does not support SB in the kernel. SB is a mechanism to steal ownership from the end user. You can find a document that says the exact opposite; typical of corporate gaslighting from the members of the UEFI consortium. The specification for Secure Boot includes a provision to allow the end user to create and sign their own SB key set. However, the design specification is not a required implementation and in many cases you will find this is not implemented in consumer grade hardware. There is a tool called Keytool that can boot directly into UEFI (wrap your head around that and you'll understand why this might be important). Good luck finding solid documentation for Keytool though. Gentoo has a guide, but all Gentoo documentation assumes a very high level of competence.

The reason people have issues with Linux and W11 coexisting is because they are not addressing the issue of UEFI Secure Boot. W11 only works with SB. If you boot into a SB distro, it will do exactly what it is supposed to do and remove any unsigned bootable code.

If you can't change SB keys for self signed, both Fedora and Ubuntu include a shim key outside of Linux. The final package manager signs this shim key with a Microsoft 3rd party key signing system m$ created. If you use one of these distros with a shim, you will not be able to mess with kernel space at all (read: potential Nvidia issues), but Linux and Windows can coexist in any configuration.

I never use W11, and I have a copy on a separate drive, but I have a W11 partition on the same NVME as Linux with no issues whatsoever using Fedora with the shim key.

I would hold onto it for a bit. If you want to run software that isn't from Steam like the game modding app Vortex for example it can be easier to tinker with it on Windows.

Most of it can run on Windows just fine with Wine or Lutris but you might run into the odd graphical glitch that can be a headache if you are inexperienced especially if you rarely use that application.

At the start I dual booted but after some months I realised everything I could do on Windows I could do on GNU/Linux, only my computer would run faster on the later and actually did what I meant. I tried to battle Windows to configure it how I wanted and it was a real pain in the rear end. My advice is go for the full switch and nuke Windows. I never looked back since.

It sounds like you're pretty much already there. I say do it and you can always undo it later with some inconvenience.

If you're the kind of person that gets demotivated really easily when there's an opportunity to crawl back than I would wait until EOL so you feel more commit it to your choice.

Though the reasoning for my mind set is because I install linux 4~ times before I really committed to using it as my daily driver. The final push was two very big bugs.

I still have windows installed but its only to play rainbow with some friends.