I was in the same boat as you about 9 months ago. I switched a failing laptop over to Linux Mint Cinnamon and was blown away by how it revived that laptop. Then I dual booted my desktop to a Windows/Mint system and found myself rarely booting into Windows because I was enjoying Linux so much. About 3 months ago I wiped Windows off the machine altogether because I just found the experience toxic in comparison to Linux. The Windows automatic updates were taking about 20 minutes to install simply because I wasn't using the OS that often. Next on the cards was an ancient desktop that had been sitting in my cupboard for over 5 years. I threw a bit of memory at it and stuck Lxle on it. It now lives in my shed for playing music and browsing the web which it does rather well. It must be at least 15 years old, perhaps even 20. Yesterday I installed Linux Mint on my partner's Lenovo laptop because I was sick of her complaining about how slow Windows 10 had become. That laptop runs faster than anything in the house. She's delighted with it. There are many distros to choose from, but I can only give you my own experience. With Mint the transition away from Windows was easy and at first I didn't even use the terminal. Now I use the terminal all the time as it really gives you the power to do some extraordinary things that you could never do on Windows. As for that one piece of software I couldn't get a Linux version of? I put Windows 7 on VirtualBox and installed it on that. Not only have I learned a tonne of stuff using Linux, it's made computers interesting to me again. Next project is an ADS-B flight receiver running from a Raspberry Pi. The good thing about Mint is it boots to a live system from USB before you install it, so you can check to see if everything is running smoothly before you take the plunge. Good luck and welcome to the dark side.

TL; DR: I think you're going to do fine and you have a good plan.

You are correct, technically "Linux" is the name of the kernel. The kernel is to an operating system what an engine is to a video game, similar to how Subnautica runs on the Unity engine, Ubuntu and Arch run on the Linux kernel. There are a lot of options for the other components of an operating system, like the package manager, the init system, the GUI if any, the default apps, the shell, all manner of stuff like that, someone releasing their preferred combination of components is called a distro. There have been thousands of them, but I would suggest looking at Fedora with Gnome or KDE desktops, Linux Mint with the Cinnamon or MATE desktop, or Pop!_OS with their Gnome fork.

Installing Linux on one of your laptops is a fantastic idea. Let that machine be the experiment zone while you maintain other machines for your main workflows. For something like web browsing you'll be up and running pretty quick. If you've ever installed Windows before, you'll find the process of installing Linux familiar if not refreshing.

Gaming on Linux has come a long way thanks in no small part to Valve. There's one setting in Steam you'll have to check called Enable Stem Play For All Titles. Steam will automatically figure out if the game has a native Linux version and install that, or if there isn't it'll grab the Windows version and run it in Proton, Valve's Wine-based compatibility layer. Works very well. I would suggest going with AMD graphics if you're going to fully switch to Linux for your gaming setup, as their drivers are right in the kernel, no fuss no muss, and the newer Wayland windowing system (replacing the venerable old X11) works better on AMD or Intel graphics. Wayland is a little spotty on Nvidia still, so I might recommend something like Linux Mint Cinnamon that still uses X11 by default with Nvidia graphics. Nvidia does still handle compute and video rendering better, so if you're doing those workloads you may want to learn how to live with Nvidia.

Something I would suggest is learning to use the terminal. I know it's unfamiliar, but there are some powerful tools and fun toys in the terminal. Should you need to troubleshoot anything, you will probably hear "run this command in the terminal and copy-paste the output," and for two reasons: 1. it's easier to copy-paste terminal commands and their outputs in text-based forums like this one and 2. there's a bunch of different GUIs out there, with different methods of getting to the information you want, some might be more minimal and not have a GUI tool for it, but the terminal command always works. You can watch Star Wars in the terminal. Seriously.

Stay on the beaten path and it is hard to go wrong. I would start with Linux Mint and then play around with it for a while. Make sure you break your Windows habits like downloading software from the web. That's bad practice and will cause issues. You want to install software from the software store which on Linux Mint shows both native packages and flatpaks. Sometimes the software you are looking for is not verified on Linux Mint so you need to go into settings and turn on show unverified apps. (I'm not sure why the Linux Mint team does this)

Keep in mind Windows 10 reaches EOL in one year. Don't be afraid to use Windows 11 if you need Windows.

Install it, don't stress and have fun 😊

I switched someone recently (she installed mint instead of kubuntu that recommended) and soon after exclaimed that it's just like windows. I think she assumed everything would be in a terminal lol, now she gaming in steam. Anyway you'll probably find it more similar than different. The one big difference is that we don't download and run software from the Internet, we have something like an app store where everything is vetted and trustworthy.

Gaming on Linux is getting a ton better, but still requires a lot of knowledge and patience

Start with Ubuntu, mostly because it has a big enough user base and following that there are millions of articles about every problem you could have.

Start using ChatGPT whenever you encounter a problem as it’s really good at debugging and interpreting error messages.

Hi, To try a Linux, you'll need a usb stick drive, at least 2go, then find a distro to try, for that, my advice is to check the ranked list on https://distrowatch.com/
Most of them have different "flavor" (aka desktop manager), gnome, xfce, cinnamon... They are consistent from a distro to another so think about it as distinct feature.
To start the ISO, you can use Ventoy, on which you copy the iso files of several distro at once. https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html
You may need to chance the order of booting of your laptop to start from the usb stick, depending of the age of the bios/Uefi, it's just a key press during the boot or on windows keep Shift pressed while clicking on the reboot start menu button.
When you get to the started distro you wanna try, you may check if all the hardware is operational (except for nvidia closed driver which need a full install) you can install software to find the tools you need, browse web to find answers to the new questions you'll have, everything you do there is volatile and disappear with restart, so it's a cool playground use it to learn as much as you can.
And after trying, breaking, and finding the coolest distro for you, you can install on your internal drive.
I play a lot on Linux, ark, genshin, civilisation, palworld... As easy as, install steam, go to settings, compatibility, check the square, and install your games, enjoy!

Since you mention gaming and learning how to troubleshoot games on Linux. This conditions your questions to whether that laptop has an Nvidia graphics card or not. Nvidia has an awful support in linux which creates all sorts of problems and limitations.

Regardless, I would suggest to use bazzite, but be warned, this is an immutable distro. They're entirely different from traditional distros and relatively newer. So there's a bit less support history on the web. Nevertheless, they provide a strong secure and stable system that should make having rescue tools less critical and keep your system alive and healthy indefinitely. Bazzite also sets up everything for gaming automatically from install.

Your approach and understand seems realistic and solid. Go with any of the beginner-friendly distributions, as people have said, Mint or Ubuntu are good choices, because most of the support information online is available for them. Because Mint is based on Ubuntu, instructions for Ubuntu will almost always work on it too.

https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

The Linux mint installation guide is IMO very clear and easy to follow, so I'd start there, and for the first time you can just go up until the "the live session" section and play around with it before deciding to install. The guide for Ubuntu is very similar.

Good luck and have fun!

Default recommendation for new ex-Windows users is to use Linux Mint, it's very simple and includes most things you need. Mint also has great documentation and community resources (forums, etc.), especially for beginners. It's also based upon the most popular distro, which is Ubuntu. So there's a high degree of Ubuntu compatibility, which is a plus.

After the distribution choice, there's the desktop environment choice. Here, I'd recommend either the default one from Mint, which is called Cinnamon (use this if you don't have a preference), or KDE Plasma as an alternative. Both are very similar to Windows, but more powerful in terms of customization and features. (Well, of course anything on Linux is very customizable already due to the open source nature, but these 2 already offer a lot of GUI customization options without any tinkering). It's not recommended for a beginner to switch desktop environments, you can do that later on when you're more comfortable with Linux. If you're curious about the other desktop choices, try them out in a VM or separate system. At the beginning, always use the preinstalled desktop environment.

Only slight downside of Mint is that it still ships with X11 by default, which is the older graphical subsystem as the foundation of each desktop environment. Wayland is the new one [actually it's just a set of protocols which the compositor implements, but that doesn't matter here]. Many distros already use Wayland, but it's still experimental on Mint. For many users, this will not make a difference in practice, which is good, but Wayland is more advanced and has more advanced features which will never land in X11, and also higher security. If you have any non-standard needs regarding things like HDR, adaptive VRR, different per-monitor refresh rates, no tearing, per-monitor scaling, good touch support, and other "advanced" things like that, chances are you're better off with Wayland. Most users probably don't need to care that much though.

Anyway, should you need a Wayland-based distro alternative, or generally a second distribution recommendation, I'd say Fedora. It's also rather easy distro, maybe not as easy as Mint is, but also very user friendly and more ahead of the curve in comparison to Mint (newer kernel, newer packages, more frequent updates).

Most users will be fine using Mint as their first distro, though. Mint will also soon be updated to Wayland as well, it's just a matter of time. Be sure to keep your system updated.

Gaming is actually easy on Linux but since most games are specifically written for Windows and the Windows stack (DirectX, etc.) and also primarily tested on Windows and many game devs don't test on Linux, there are sometimes things that might not work out of the box or you might need to try different options or compatibility tool versions (e.g. experimental version of Proton, or GE-Proton, or things like that). But Valve and lots of other individuals are constantly improving the situation and fixing compatibility issues should any come up. Compatibility is generally super high these days (like around 90%) so most users will not have any problems, especially not if they are playing any kind of recent or popular games where there's a lot of focus to get them to run well, but some specific things or titles still might not work. For example some unethical game studios (most notably Epic Games, Bungie, EA, Riot) utilize integrated anti-cheat tools in their games (most notably Fortnite, Valorant, LoL, Destiny 2, Battlefield) which deliberately block all Linux users, even though the games would technically run on Linux as well. You can and should check protondb.com for general Linux compatibility reports of a Steam game, and areweanticheatyet.com for Linux compatibility of games which include anti-cheat components. If you're not sure, check both sites. An anti-cheat component often only exists for the multiplayer part of a game, not for the single-player part. Most single-player games do not have or need any anti-cheat components. Generally, do not install games on an NTFS partition or re-use your Windows-based NTFS partition for games. This can and will cause problems. Always install your games on Linux partitions like ext4, btrfs or xfs.

If you use dual-boot (Linux being installed on another partition alongside Windows), be sure to disable the "fast startup" option in Windows (somewhere in the power management settings). And if you have an issue of the clock being wrong after you boot the other OS, then you maybe want to configure Linux to write the time back into the hardware clock in your local time format, which is what Windows expects to find there. But you can also reconfigure Windows to write its time back in UTC format (registry setting), which might be the format Linux expects to read from the hardware clock. Not sure what Mint does by default. I'd say only look into this if you have problems of the clock being wrong after you boot from Windows to Linux or from Linux to Windows. If the clock is always right, then you don't need to reconfigure anything. Just keep in mind that Windows by default writes back its time in local format, Linux in UTC format.

If you want to install additional software: If you come from Windows, you might be familiar with visiting websites of software then downloading a setup.exe/msi from there. That's NOT how you install software on Linux. On Linux, you first look if there's a package available for your distribution (use the preinstalled programs/tools for that). The primary place for this is your distro's package repositories. Then you might check Flathub (the default Flatpak (distribution independent) package repository). You will find most software there already. If you don't find it there, check any Mint community repositories. Afterwards, check if there's an AppImage available (those are basically one file which contains all files needed for the program, no installation). If you still don't find anything, ask on a Mint forum. You usually DO NOT install a software from its source code form or any installer/setup scripts, especially not as a beginner. This is an easy way to make it either too complicated or to break your system. Always try to find existing packages for your distro first (use the preinstalled programs/tools for that), then try the distro independent Flatpaks, then AppImages. You should find everything you need like that. When you think of installing software on Linux, think of how you'd install software on Android or iOS, you use an "App Store" or install an existing package (similar to .apk / .ipa) directly. Any other method is NOT recommended for a beginner. On Mint/Ubuntu/Debian, software package files have the .deb extension.

My two suggestions are:

• On your first week, configure a backup solution (check your distro wiki for details). Because linux is very customizable, reinstalls can be painful.
• Use flatpaks for applications, there are good store applications that simplify the process. (Some apps misbehave as a flatpak, like Steam).

I'd suggest to start with ubuntu. I'd the distro that has the most guides/resources available.

Personally, I prefer xubuntu. Which is ubuntu, but with a slimmed down UI.

I've heard good things about https://www.linuxmint.com/, maybe read about that one too.

To get started, I always use Rufus (https://rufus.ie/en/) which downloads the required files, and makes a bootable USB flash drive.

I just did this in September. I would second bazzite. I have a Nvidia GPU and I haven't had a single issue with it. Bazzite is atomic/immutable which makes it more difficult to modify the system or add packages but honestly I haven't actually needed to modify the system or add any packages. It also has A/B partitions and stores the last OS update so if something gets corrupted or an update doesn't work you can roll back really easily. I know some people will say if you want to use Linux you need to be comfortable with using the terminal but I haven't had to touch it.

Back in 2016 I ran Ubuntu on a laptop and I remember having to install everything from apt and tweak stuff. I also remember accidentally messing up my system and having to do a fresh install. Flatpaks have really changed it since then.

You can checkout https://flathub.org to see what apps are available in the built in app store. You can also look at https://protondb.com to see how well specific windows games run on Linux and any tweaks that might help them run better.

I still have a windows partition though since SteamVR doesn't work on Linux and discord screen sharing doesn't work on Wayland