I’ve since graduated to scripting stuff to launch through wine (mostly chummer5 for shadowrun) but proton was a great lazy way of doing it

I’m pretty fresh to Linux myself, but as far as I know it’s exclusive to steam. You can launch non-steam stuff through it by adding the .exe to the Steam client, I played Fallout 1 this way

I made the switch 2-3 months ago, and I went with Kubuntu. It’s absolutely fine, but if I knew then what I know now I’d likely have gone pop or mint, just to not bother with snaps (although they’re pretty easy to get rid of).

As others have said, get Ventoy on a USB stick, use that to have a play with a few live environments and get a feel for what desktop environment you might want to use. KDE and Cinnamon I think are pretty good Desktop Environments if you’re used to Windows, but have some fun with it and also try a few that are very different to windows, you might find yourself liking them (I really like using i3 on my laptop where the screen is fairly low res)