I'm almost impressed with what people willingly put up with.
Not here to eulogize over what I moved to, but I think it's important people consider why they're still using Windows. It's not your friend.
I sadly still need to use Excel in a VM sometimes, because the text import crashes in Wine. But apart from that, this year has finally been the year of the Linux Desktop for me. And 3 months later, I can say that it's been a bliss :)
PopOS feels exceptionally responsive. Looking back, it's hard to justify why Windows was feeling so sluggish on a PCI5 NVME with 64GB RAM and high-end GPU...
I still need to check whether all my favourite games are supported on Linux. Also, a lot of my games are from GOG rather than Steam. And I need to choose a good distribution. My laziness and indecisiveness is holding me back.
But I really think the time is right for something better. An OS on a Linux-like foundation, with an Apple-style UI (but better, because plenty of stuff there still doesn't make sense), capable of running all games. Probably developed and polished by a big hardware manufacturer trying to eat Apple's lunch. There's System76 of course, but they're small. I want something that's for everybody. A new standard to draw everybody away from the increasing piles of crap from Apple and Microsoft.
You can check ProtonDB for compatibility. The information is valid even if you have the GOG version of the game. For games that are not on Steam there is WineDB but I find that the UI isn't as nice as ProtonDB.
Steam has a Linux launcher and let you install Windows binaries directly. For GOG or Epic games there is Heroic launcher which is very easy to use.
Don't overthink your distribution choice, just go for one of the major general purpose distribution (Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, etc) and you'll be fine no matter what you pick.
Personally when I have a few dozen data points and I want an X/Y plot with a line, I find a spreadsheet is a better tool than MySQL.
My solution for this is to have 2 computers.
I have a macbook as main computer, with all my documents, study, etc.
And I have a desktop computer with Windows for gaming only. I treat this pc as a console, it’s only for gaming. Any OS annoyance is similar as a xbox/ps5 annoyance, but it’s still more flexible than a console.
Give me a Jupyter notebook written in a language I don't yet know any day before you give me a complicated excel monstrosity.
There’s a weirdly long thread of dorky gaming infighting happening in the top comment where people don’t seem to know that you can just use Windows for a few games and otherwise use a main OS for the rest of your time.
All said, I really liked PopOS, it has some very sane defaults, good out of the box support for hardware as well. Most of the support is upstream via Ubuntu, but a lot of UI tweaks and custom additions are coming from System76, and they have been doing very well. Will likely switch back for the next LTS release.
It's a strange amorphous organism that can be coaxed into doing almost anything, if poorly.
Also, I think the choice of window manager might matter more to my experience than the choice of distribution. I find some Linux wms too clunky, too Win95.