You don’t need a high level of technical skill. You can learn everything you need to get started in a few minutes of tutorials or walk throughs. The rest you learn as you go.

Bear in mind no every linux user has memorized every terminal command and the whole file structure. Lots of people are just casual users who learn what they need.

One of the things I wish someone had told me at the start of using linux is that initially your desktop environment will effect how you feel about linux more than the distribution or specific architecture of the OS.

The good news is they’re all free. Try a few things and see what you like. IMO Fedora is a great, beginner friendly Gnome or KDE experience. Mint has an excellent Cinnamon and XFCE desktop either of which will feel somewhat familiar to a windows user. Mint will also run on just about anything.

Also, it’s not binary. You can dual boot. If there’s something you need windows for you can use it. Over time you’ll eventually find that you don’t really need windows anymore.

Absolutely. I likewise moved to Linux more out of frustration with Windows than any of my own tech ability. It needn’t be a concerted effort either. I had it on a separate SSD (for a more stable dual-boot) and dabbled for a couple of years until I found myself gradually booting into Linux instead of Windows more and more.

I take it you’ve never even tried Linux before. Both of those things are not things that will hold you back. My mom uses Linux, and she barely knows what “right click” means.

With regard to your Steam games, as long as you don’t play games that use restrictive anticheat, you’ll be fine.

Lots of good advice here. I’ll add a bit about dual booting.

1. the problem with dual booting is when you use the same physical hard drive. Windows doesn’t play nice sometimes on the same drive. Just do yourself a favor and buy a second ssd. Then you can break linux six ways to Sunday and always have a windows backup. (And if you want to be extra safe - you can just unplug your windows drive during Linux install and you can’t f up and pick the wrong drive by accident)

2. dual booting is nice just in case something doesn’t work - you can easily switch back to windows.

3. dual booting sucks because there’s very few things that don’t work in Linux - it just requires a little elbow grease to figure out. But having a windows partition right there leads to many people giving up way too early with fixing their issues.

My recommendation is always to have more than one drive in your computer. It’s YOUR computer. Regardless of what you pick as your “main” OS, you always have another spot to screw around in. Distro hop, extra storage, set up a hiveos miner, whatever. Its flexibility and screwing around with other things helps you understand what’s YOUR computer vs what is Microsoft’s OS.

This post is like catnip to Lemmy users.

If your library is on steam, then there’s nothing to worry about! Works natively on Linux. If your library is on other platforms, I’d honestly think twice about switching full time. Dual booting might be a better option. My library is split amongst multiple platforms and I decided that it wasn’t working well enough for me. Steam games will work great though!

Many distros are easy enough to install and navigate as a newbie. My go to for years now has been Linux Mint! It’s based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian.

Check your games on ProtonDB

The only games in my library that don’t work are entirely the publisher’s fault for blacklisting Linux in their anticheat, and it’s very few games even then.

Not so much help but hope: I got rid of Windows 11 and switched fully to Linux Mint a few weeks ago. I had no idea what I was doing but I tested things on USB and also on a very old laptop I had laying around before I made it my daily driver.

I’m not particularly a tech person. I own a small creative business and have a toddler, but I figured out what I needed to quickly. I don’t game and didnt use Winsows exclusive software so have no opinions about that.

What I didn’t expect: to actually be genuinely interested in my computer again for the first time since I was a teenager (which was not recent…). I love customizing my desktop. I love discovering new open source software. I’m learning more than I expected and it’s just a totally different relationship with the tech I use every day, in a nice way. And no more BS ads / bloat when I’m just trying to exist on my computer.

Just welcome to the club. Greetings.

• before you switch, sort out your apps. Look at what you use on windows, see if it runs on Linux. If not, find a replacement that does and test it out.
• Most Linux distros can boot into a desktop from a thumb drive. You can play and test without touching your windows installation.
• in that vein, ventoy is neat. You can make a bootable drive and drop ISOs in a folder to boot from. No messing with etcher or whatever it’s called
• desktop environment matters as much as the distro. Check out gnome, KDE, and cinnamon.

Linux is way easier than it was even 10 years ago and many games run better on Linux than they do on Windows. There’s gaming distros but I’m not sure what the benefit is other than the built-in NVIDIA drivers. I just game on Fedora. You need to enable Proton stuff in the settings and you’re off.