And you'll still never be able to get rid of all the telemetry and annoying shit..

I just did the switch myself on a new PC and getting gaming working wasn't even that hard. I picked fedora cinnamon.

Difficulties I had:

1. When trying the initial live boot, it failed checksum... Because windows fucked with the drive after it saw the utility that wrote the image to it left it "unmounted" (and autoplay would had also fucked with it if I hadn't turned that off ages ago).
2. Wired ethernet wasn't working. Wifi does work, currently using that until I get around to working on that again, though it might just work now that it's updated.
3. After installing steam, many games said they were windows games only. Had to enable a setting inside steam to get it to just run them all via proton. Only tried two games so far, but haven't seen any issues yet. My saves are usable on the one game I was already playing on windows.
4. Optical audio wasn't working. Worked around that by plugging in my soundbar to usb, though I've also confirmed that the analog port does work. This one might also have been resolved by updating.
5. Had to set up permissions for steam to use my games partition instead of my home dir for installing games, though I think this was because I missed a step during the install.

It took more effort getting YouTube (well porn but apparently the same issue affects YouTube) working (netflix just worked, quality seems to even be better, like it doesn't seem to default to a low quality stream before moving up as the video plays like it would in windows). And even that was only because the desktop I picked didn't use the same software as instructions for enabling 3rd party repositories and I for some reason decided to search for a GUI option instead of just running the command I could have run from the start.

The only difficult part is that with all of the available desktops out there that do things a bit differently, it can be hard to find solutions specific to the one you're using. Like I might have caused some future issues by installing gnome-software since cinnamon uses a different tool for that. But at this point, I feel like making the jump to a different desktop (or even distro) will be much easier, so don't feel like I'm committed to the one I did pick.

Which is so much better than windows because on that platform I had to struggle to not be committed to things I didn't and wouldn't pick. And it made me avoid updating often because I didn't want to commit to whatever nagware ms added this time to try to get me to use some software I wasn't interested in using.

Windows 11 us honestly pretty good. I wouldn't go back to Windows 10 personally.

I do run Linux pretty much exclusively though

Until your WiFi driver stops getting updates.

ref: Linux's Sole Wireless/WiFi Driver Maintainer Is Stepping Down