Iv been running garuda Linux GNOME edition on my gaming rig for years. Best Linux experience iv had. Honestly in my opinion and theres 2 schools of thought on this. The windows paradigm is literally shit workflow design, and thats just objective assessment. The only reason it has carried on is because people got real familiar with very shitty design choices.

I think you may want to consider opening yourself up to trying a whole new UX. Try out GNOME would be my suggestion. NixOS is another positive choice. You can install almost all your software graphically in basically 1 click using flatpak too these days and thanks to steam and their investment in proton. Most steam games work REALLY WELL on Linux.

People usually recommend Linux mint or some Ubuntu version. I recommend neither.

Ubuntu is a proprietary-solution-ridden piece of hot garbage that tries to hinders what you do at any chance. I use it daily for work, unfortunately.

It’s been a few years since I tried mint. It looked good and felt nice for the first few hours, after that I don’t remember what happened, it was maybe lack of configurabilità or lack of support, but I noped out very quickly and I just remember that my thoughts were “never again”.

I never tried it, but it looks like Pop!_OS might be the thing to look out for in this space.

Besides that, know that Linux is different from windows starting from its very philosophy. Keep an open mind, it can be a confusing journey for a beginner (which is why I am holding back about telling you about the many possibilities).

One thing to keep in mind is that some software that you were used to will not be available, and that you might need to look for alternatives. But as far as the things you mentioned go, these are my recommendations:

• browser: Firefox
• gaming: steam
• streaming: OBS