Maybe give an immutable OS, like Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite a try?

The idea is that it's very hard to break the system, because apps are containerized, so they don't 'touch' the system, and updates take effect only on reboots.

If update is broken, it won't apply. And you can always rollback to previous state, if you don't like something.

You don't need to install stuff from the terminal, and you can install them from a GUI 'store'.

Pretty simple, really. Buy a console for gaming, or a separate machine for gaming. I don't game, the joy of that died with the loss of lan parties and Tribes II.

Choose a system, make it your daily driver for work and home, and you will form the habits and muscle memory. Don't and it will remain a struggle to some degree or another.

You don't choose Linux. Linux choose you. That being said

It's not that hard actually but you need a lot of free time and motivation to keep learning. When I was a student I was deep on Archlinux + DWM / AwesomeWM + lots of console applications now that I am a functional working men I just stick to a stable distro (Currently Debian Testing) I think the secret is have good hardware compatibility and if you want to try some weird configuration just use a VM first or just use a immutable distro.

I hope that snaps, flatpaks, AppImages, etc., will make a big difference in terms of adoption and ease of use. As @Millie@lemm.ee said, if complications arise while trying to install or use software, then you're basically screwed unless you have a really good tutorial or deep knowledge. I've been using various Linux distros as daily drivers for the past ~10 years, and in that time, I still haven't figured out why there's such a big emphasis on compiling software. Your average Windows user has probably never even heard of compilation let alone been required to compile software in order to use it. For better or worse, the emphasis in Windows is on shipping binaries that the user can simply double-click to run. And if we want to reduce frustration for new Linux users, we can't expect them to know how to compile software. Snaps, flatpaks, and AppImages definitely move us in the right direction even if there's a lot of internal debate about which of those is best.

It's also nice to see big flagship projects like Gnome finally really taking off in terms of quality. Of course, the Gnome desktop environment won't appeal to everyone aesthetically, and it's generally much more resource-intensive than Cinnamon, KDE, XFCE, LXQt, etc.; but distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, Pop!_OS, etc., look really great and work really well out of the box for most people. Same with Linux Mint. And I personally don't care for KDE, but it's another DE that's pretty solid.

Well lets look at what i did to switch to linux. It was about 2 years ago and I was still using windows 8 since I didn't all the spyware in my operating system. I went with linux mint first since it was stated to be super new user friendly. I was so new to linux that I had to ask what neofetch was and how to use it. It was easy to use but I mostly just use web browser, steam, and libre office, which I had been useing libre office for years before that. Linux mint made a very frictionless new user experience. But I still needed that motive to move onto to something now. For me that breaking point was windows just having so must spyware in the os. Rather then using windows 10 or 11 I held onto window to windows 8 and then moved onto linux mint.

I DON'T ALWAYS ASTROTURF

I've been daily driving Pop on my laptop and my biggest frustrations currently are lack of working drivers for the fingerprint reader and speakers, and the Proton VPN client is crap compared to Windows.