I run Mint on all of my systems, 2 duel-boot Windows 11 from separate drives. I have some games; I should be more adventurous. I use Wine for Irfanview and 7Zip, and I am...getting used to it. Proton is supposed to be a good thing; I hope all the fixes are open.
I generally shut off shader cache's. I have a Samsung 840, that has been used for video editing. Oddly, it still works. Although shader caches are a pittance compared to video editing, every little bit wears SSD's out. BTW, the 4TB Samsung 990 Series NVMe I was looking at six months ago, went up from $385 to $621. In the end--even excessive logging wears SSD's, as a whole block is written for even a one byte update.
From the getgo, most of he sites you visit, you will be checked for AI--because AI has scraped everything from the internet, copyrights or not. Add to that problem. we are already seeing raising unemployment, oil-eating/planet-warming data centers, billionaires becoming even richer so they can meddle with you government--and for what?