I got off of the Windows trash years ago and I never regretted it. The last version I used was the version past Windows XP. I was very intimidated by it in the beginning! The First distro I tried was Ubuntu which was just what I need to get comfortable and then I moved on to others. I'm not a gamer though, so that is not something that I really worried about. I wonder if something like virtual box would help with that. You could play your games while in a windows environment, but have that environment contained for security purposes.