As others have said, I too think the golden era of video games is now. Games are getting better and better and there has never been a bigger selection of games to play than right now. There have never been as many people enjoying video games than right now. That being said, I don’t play as much as I used to, but that’s mostly because I’ve been getting older and working in video games for almost 20 years I’ve been a bit overexposed to the medium.

When I was studying computer science I had a dual-boot setup on my laptop. I was never happy with a VM but it’s not a lot of work to set up so you could try that first! With dual-boot I could still use Windows if I absolutely needed it for a course. I can recommend the Arch Linux wiki, it has many articles and tutorials. It’s only really useful if you are using Arch Linux or a distro based on Arch, e.g. EndeavourOS

The downside is, you will be spending a lot of time customizing your Linux and fixing problems. This can be very rewarding and a great learning experience but it also takes time and effort. If you want to spend less time with your computer and more time talking to people offline or enjoying nature, installing Linux can be a bad idea.