Really I think a temporary dual boot to test everything would be the sanest option, and then when you're ready to commit, back up your home folder and repartition your drive accordingly. If you end up never ready to commit, well, second-gen Ryzen is officially supported on Windows 11 as long as you enable fTPM and Secure Boot in your BIOS.
Here's a few pointers based on what I've found out:
The desktop environment or WM is important. Given your need for Steam Link to work I'd suggest using one with X11, as last I checked Steam Link just gives you a black screen and audio under Wayland. Linux Mint would carry over your knowledge of apt while maintaining an interface that's pretty familiar to Windows users and is I believe still an X11 distro for now.
I got the EA app working using Bottles but it constantly feels like a cat-and-mouse game fixing it whenever it has an update. I basically stopped using it altogether for that reason. Not trying to scare you off — it's just not a great experience.
Play with drivers for your GPU. The situation with Nvidia is, I'm told, not as dire as it once was on Linux but still needs more work than AMD or Intel graphics to work well. The proprietary driver may still give the best experience on games, though Nouveau seems to be doing very well. This is admittedly something I need to come back to in order to confirm (I have one machine with Nvidia graphics and it's in storage specifically because Nvidia graphics under Linux were such a pain).
It'll be compatible with 5 Gbps devices, but if you're intentionally looking to restrict even 10 Gbps devices down to 5 Gbps for some reason, you might be able to find something in your BIOS that lets you do that, or you can get a USB 3.0 extension cable that'll limit your speeds to 5 Gbps.
I moved to Pop!_OS entirely when I built my new system earlier this year (had already been using it on my non-gaming laptop for several years) and relegated Windows to an external SSD that has been essentially collecting dust — I think I've used it three or four times.
My experience isn't the same as everyone's, but I'm not in love with most multiplayer games, my work uses software that can be run within Wine/Bottles or a browser, and my preferred creative outlet is writing, which could also be done in a browser if I wasn't such a picky bitch (I am, but Scrivener barely needs massaging to work under Wine and can even be made to look native thanks to using Qt).
Damn, this is a shame. Penny's Big Breakaway has been the most fun I've had on a game for a while, but I kind of expected it wasn't going to be a huge success for people who hadn't been following the Evening Star team for years with a new and unproven IP and a rather unique gameplay style among platformers.
Chrono Trigger is still being sold actually, so probably not the best example. That said, I still have my original PS1 Chrono Trigger disc that I haven't played on original hardware (or even my still-hooked-up PS3) for a while because I legally dumped it and play it with a much higher emulated disc read speed. As much as Nintendo has made explicit statements to the contrary, it is legal in most countries to back up your own games and do with them what you will.
You'll have substantially better results from modern integrated graphics (even on the low-end Intel UHD side). This is genuinely the card you get if you just need the extra outputs and don't care about performance, or you have a CPU lacking integrated graphics and don't care about performance.
In other words, there are use cases for it, but I absolutely agree that a gaming card this is not and it has a very specific niche.
I would argue that NixOS absolutely is the OS you get if your time is worthless, but not every distro is the same. I'd argue that if you need something that doesn't have so many issues a stabler or easier to use distro (Debian, Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, Linux Mint, and even Fedora or openSUSE) is going to be a better option than trying to bend specifically NixOS to do what you want.
I personally use a mix of Pop, Debian, and Fedora, not because they're particularly powerful, but because they tend to be more straightforward for what I want to do than NixOS, Gentoo, or Arch. I don't mind tinkering, but for my main machines I don't want to tinker much.
Edit: I should clarify that there are plenty of reasonable uses of Windows and I don't fault anyone for using it especially if their familiarity is keeping them from understanding Linux as well as they want to. But I also would make the case that there are a lot of distros out there.
I like this one, it's pretty cute and has a neat gameplay concept involving "hacking" other robots to get to places you can't get to with your regular ball form. It's rather short; I have 45 minutes clocked in it on Steam and have gone through the whole game and gotten all its collectibles.
If you're using Linux, use Proton 9.0 or Experimental; earlier versions will play the game without any audio.
You and I would have been enemies in the 16-bit era, but I adore the Sega Genesis. (However, I'm also a sleepy bisexual, so I'm gonna say we're probably nowhere close to enemies.)
It was an arcade monster and got a ton of amazing games from the arcades and purpose-built for the machine — many the SNES also got, but some exclusives that really took advantage of what the Genesis could do well. I'd argue that the gritty FM sound chip was better for certain types of game music as well, though that's not to say that the SNES wasn't largely superior on that front.
At the end of the day… yeah 16 bit stuff looks amazing
Really I think a temporary dual boot to test everything would be the sanest option, and then when you're ready to commit, back up your home folder and repartition your drive accordingly. If you end up never ready to commit, well, second-gen Ryzen is officially supported on Windows 11 as long as you enable fTPM and Secure Boot in your BIOS.
Here's a few pointers based on what I've found out: