Just going to say, I do those things too, on Linux, and while I can’t say I never have to mess with config files, it’s not frequent. And, the computer acting like it’s my computer rather than on loan from a megacorp is nice.

It’s not all the way there yet but it’s so very close and the bits that are still pain points aren’t nearly as bad as the pain points of Windows.

As the other commenter said, you should give it a serious try. Mint is very smooth overall.

You owe it to yourself to try it out! I recommend dual booting into Linux Mint Cinnamon for a while and have your windows install to fall back on to. That or one of the gaming-specific distributions, but from what I’ve seen Mint does all with gaming too. It’s a good all-around starting place, and there are a lot of resources because it’s popular and built off of the most popular distro. I installed it on my work machine (software engineering) and I’ve felt no lack of capability or a need to switch to a more “hardcore” distro.

Hey I will give my anecdotal recent experience. Several months ago I switched to Pop! OS and have had basically no issues. I have an Nvidia GPU and I play a lot of games. I don’t play any games that are blocked by anti cheat (not because I can’t, I just don’t happen to play the few that are blocked).

I spent the first day getting everything signed in, installed, set up and tweaked to how I like it with very minimal terminal usage. Mostly gui and clicking.

Steam+Proton along with lutris makes it easy to play any game for me.

Side note: I have 4 monitors of varying resolution, size, orientation and refresh rate and it hasn’t caused problems other than the initial setup (I used cursr to help with this)

If you can live without games having invasive anticheat, then everything should be doable, and probably a lot easier than in Windows.