I'm not going to pretend I've been a Linux purist my entire life or anything. The landscape for daily driving desktop Linux was really rough in the time period you described attempting to migrate, but I had Linux laptops assigned to each kid in my school circa 2007 and that ignited my interest in the platform. My father was an enthusiast and build a safe environment for me to experiment as a kid when I otherwise would have been out of my depth. I had a Linux box, usually an Ubuntu derivative, around pretty much continuously from 2012-2017 which would have been pre-uni for me and served as just an environment I could easily play with making small web projects and Minecraft mods and whatnot. But I gamed on windows for most of that time. I think when proton hit I failed to install arch and bounced over to Manjaro which was my main gaming distro untill maybe ~2021 when I got tired of things breaking because of the aur and just migrated to arch using the arch install script came out and I was able to set it up trivially. Since then it's been pretty much "it just works" level compatibility, there are some niche things about my setup that are a little more complicated like some networked pulseaudio stuff and a bunch of development tools I need for work at this point, but overall I have my wife running fedora on her laptop and using a steam deck in desktop mode at her desk and she generally is able to do her schooling and whatnot without issue. I think the only real program she has issues with is an examination specific browser that she has to use another machine in the house for. I have not daily driven windows for the better part of the last decade and while I definitely have frustrations with no great CAD solution and the antagonistic relationship with publishers like EA and Epic Games, I also just am able to play my friendslop and souls games without any issues at all. I'm sorry you had negative experiences with the community, but it's kinda weird to direct your negative feelings for the losers that gatekept you at the entire platform, particularly when the platform grossly outsizes this particular niche and it's through the support of countless open source developers that we have the ability to do anything outside of the scope of Windows spyware or the fenced garden that is MacOS.