I’m going to go out on a limb here… If you have no Linux experience, download virtualbox and a handful of distros to try out in your current machine.
CachyOS is great for gaming, I’d suggest the KDE desktop
PopOS is also a great choice, their native cosmic desktop is nice.
Mint with cinnamon is also a good choice for gaming and daily use
Bazzite is also a popular gaming distro that also uses KDE
Xubuntu is also a great choice, Ubuntu base with XFCE desktop, great for gaming and a big supportive community
Try these and maybe a handful others to play with until you find a desktop that you find intuitive and easy to find what you need. Once you play with a few of these pick one and try to stick with it as you learn Linux in a full native install.
Another really simple way to do essentially the same is to set the bios in your machine to support boot from a USB stick (and in some machines, that involves disabling the ‘secure boot’ setting that prevents any OS but the OEM OS from loading on the machine). Once you’ve got that, you can run any distro if you’ve got it on a USB stick by booting your machine from it.
I’m going to go out on a limb here… If you have no Linux experience, download virtualbox and a handful of distros to try out in your current machine.
CachyOS is great for gaming, I’d suggest the KDE desktop PopOS is also a great choice, their native cosmic desktop is nice. Mint with cinnamon is also a good choice for gaming and daily use Bazzite is also a popular gaming distro that also uses KDE Xubuntu is also a great choice, Ubuntu base with XFCE desktop, great for gaming and a big supportive community
Try these and maybe a handful others to play with until you find a desktop that you find intuitive and easy to find what you need. Once you play with a few of these pick one and try to stick with it as you learn Linux in a full native install.
Another really simple way to do essentially the same is to set the bios in your machine to support boot from a USB stick (and in some machines, that involves disabling the ‘secure boot’ setting that prevents any OS but the OEM OS from loading on the machine). Once you’ve got that, you can run any distro if you’ve got it on a USB stick by booting your machine from it.
Another great idea, just keep in mind how much of a performance hit running an os off of a USB is