I am kind of in the same boat as you, except I haven’t yet tried Linux. I’ve just been reading up information about it and I also mostly use my PC for gaming and some work, but work is mostly in a browser anyway. I hecking despise Microsoft now for Windows 11 and just had to battle their forced updates that nearly bricked my computer and I’ve finally had enough. May I ask, which version of Linux did you find worked “out of the box” for you?

I’m still on W10 and this is what’s happening to me, my hardware is good enough, but I don’t want W11. It keeps forcing me to upgrade, it even downloaded the update without my consent and one day it just started installing, despite me telling it not to at every possible point. Something went very wrong with the update and after I rolled back to W10, my OS got corrupted and now I am moving to Linux Mint, as soon as I make sure nothing in my actual PC broke (event log says harddisk has bad blocks, but this only started happening after the forced update screwed things up).

How anyone at Microsoft thinks this is ok and a good way to treat a reliable user since W95, is just beyond me. But I am really excited to dip into the Linux world, finally!