If you’re going to dual boot, the latest version of Fedora makes that really easy to set up. Linux Mint is also a really good choice. For the love of god, avoid Ubuntu like the plague. It is not user friendly anymore. If you ever have to look up a guide on how to set up Flatpak, you’re in the wrong distro. Flatpaks should be front and center in the software center.

Btw, you don’t download installers from the internet like you do with Windows. You install software from the software app. On Gnome, it’s called Software, and on KDE, it’s called Discover. Fedora offers both Gnome and KDE. Since you’re new to Linux, I’d recommend KDE. It’s similar to the Windows layout.

Then Mint uses Cinnamon. It’s similar to a Windows layout. I don’t know what the software app is called. Cinnamon is really user friendly and familiar. You’d like it.

Then there’s Bazzite. Bazzite is great if you only want to game. Like, if you’re setting up a console-like PC for your living room. But, it does have some issues. The biggest one is that it’s immutable. That’s great (and actually beneficial) if you don’t need to change anything about the system, which you probably don’t anyway, but it gets annoying if you ever need to do anything more advanced. It also can only install containerized apps, so like Flatpak. (It can technically install packages, but they get wiped on the next update.) If you’re really 100% sure that you’re only ever going to game and do very basic things like browsing, basic photo editing, media, etc, then Bazzite would work for you. Remember to run the updater from Desktop Mode once in a while.

Since Linux is free and easy to installed, you can try out all and see which one you like. If you’re dual booting, that might be a bad idea, so instead, try them out using VirtualBox in Windows. In a VirtualBox, your games won’t run, btw, because they don’t have access to your graphics card.

If your games aren’t running well, you may need to install the Nvidia drivers from the software app. Just search for Nvidia driver, and you’ll find it. After an install and a reboot, your games should run fine.

Backup everything on your PC before you continue, in case anything goes wrong. As another user recommended, installing Linux to a separate drive is a lot easier and less problematic than trying to resize your Windows partition and use the same drive.

Final notes, some things to know about Linux:

• Windows games run through Proton. Proton is based on Wine. It’s a translation layer that takes system and API calls from the game and translates them from Windows calls to Linux calls. It has very little performance impact, if any at all.
• No drive letters: you have a root file system mounted at /, and other drives get mounted to paths inside that. This is how normal computers have worked since the 60s. Windows has drive letters because it is based on DOS, which was weird. Also, it uses a slash to separate paths instead of a backslash. Again, backslash is a weird DOS thing.
• The terminal really isn’t scary. It’s just a way to run apps that generally don’t have a GUI, but instead take text as input and give text as output.
• You probably won’t need to use the terminal.
• If anyone ever tells you to run a command that starts with “dd” or “rm”, be super wary. Those commands can destroy your system. Same with “sudo”. That command runs things as “root”, which is the administrator account.
• ”Linux” generally refers to a bunch of different operating systems with varying experiences and difficulty levels, but technically, “Linux” is just a kernel. Some people get all pedantic about it. Ignore them.
• Linux offers different file systems. Btrfs is awesome, ext4 is rock solid, zfs is also awesome but more complicated. Linux can read and write to NTFS (Windows) partitions as long as Bitlocker is disabled.
• Full disk encryption is super easy on everything except Bazzite.
• A dot (“.”) in front of a file name in Linux makes the file hidden. So “myfile” is not hidden, and “.myfile” is hidden.
• If you change systems, everything installed as a Flatpak stores its stuff in the “.var” folder in your home directory. If you copy that folder over to your new system, all your Flatpak apps will have everything set up already for you. For that reason, you can uninstall the browser that comes with your OS and install a browser through Flatpak if you want it to be super easy to migrate.
• Linux updates are super easy compared to Windows. Just use the software app, it will update everything on your system (except games).
• Linux is fun.
• Linux is life.
• Linux is love.