Linux is as easy as making a USB stick and changing an option or two on your BIOS, took me about a half an hour including the installation time (compared to two hours to do a Windows restore).

Once you’re in, installing the most common programs is easy since ubuntu comes with a very mature package manager. just open the terminal (it’s very similar to MS DOS or Powershell if you’ve ever used those) and type something like “sudo apt-get install firefox” and it will automatically download and install Firefox. Some Linux OSs like Pop_OS come with a gui version of this that is similar to installing an app on a phone app store.

Games can be a little bit trickier, but the program Lutris handles the most common workarounds and tricks needed to get everything to work. Generally just use that program’s “add game” feature to run the game’s installer and it will handle the rest, or if you have games on Steam/Epic/GoG you can sync your account to Lutris and have everything on one app. The most I’ve had to do to get a game working is go into the launcher settings and add an argument (like “-forcedx11”) or tell Lutris to use a different version of WINE from the default.

As others are saying, games with an anti-cheat don’t like being run on Linux and often require a workaround if they work at all. The reason for this is Linux’s default security features not giving anti-cheat programs access to the level that they want, so even when they support Linux officially (as Easy Anti Cheat does iirc) developers don’t like to enable it. Lutris is capable of running scripts that can automate this for you, though it might break on an update, just search their website.