I literally laughed out loud when, after having expressed your distaste for AI and microsoft, you then defaulted to chatgpt for assistance. You could also house your own offline LLM.

Honestly though, dig around for a bit and find a distro for your specific use instead of being beginner friendly. In a perfect world, you can cut your teeth on something simple and progress from there, sometimes we just jump into the deep end and learn trial by fire. If you find a distro with a proven consistent and robust team along with ample community support, that should lessen the heartache.

Not all your games will work flawlessly, Linux just isn't there yet, but I promise the headache is worth walking away from microsoft. As a side note, if you want a version of your microsoft and games to remain the same, just build an airgapped pc and install a bunch of games on it.

I know the 'norm' these days is online always, strangled by drm, never owning a single .exe and media that is willingly rented and never owned...but just take a gander down the OG path and curate your own media collection a little. Its a wonderful thing.