Surprised that nobody yelled Proton yet? Lots of Windows games running pretty good, some close to native, some even better on Linux through Proton. But here is the thing you mentioned which could be a problem: anti cheat. It works on Linux but depends on the developer to enable it. Some major games simply does not support it. You can check them here: https://areweanticheatyet.com/ , for general compability check https://protondb.com , even non Steam games can run through Lutris with little to no hassle. Proxmox with GPU passthrough seems like a big clunky overhead in terms of gaming but maybe you got that game that will never run on Linux.

Yes take a look here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Sudo#Enable_insults

I like when my system insults me when I do dumb things. This is why enabled the „insults“ option in my sudoers config.

True but it depends on your usecase- of you need all the fancy new stuff and want to move on quickly you should go another route instead of fucking around with forced software you do not want. Maybe Debian testing or Fedora? If you do not care about the newest stuff I guess Mint is a perfect fit.

Snapless Ubuntu is called Linux Mint, no guide needed.

Brave is also spyware, I probably would chose edge over brave lol. But a real alternative is ungoogled chromium.

It is hard to adapt Windows habits to Linux for some cases. E.g. you sometimes use Adobe Photocrap for editing photos. Reasonable that ppl want to use what they know, so they will try to use it with WINE and obviously will fail. „Linux sucks, it cant run the properitary shit subscription software, going back to Windows!“ if someone really depends on such software then yes stay the fuck with Windows. For most other tasks there is a solution available. And for the fear of terminal: I bet most users never ever have to see or use it once since there are GUI tools available for such crucial tasks like updating. Mint does a great job in terms of windows like experience for beginners but also is a full fledged GNU/Linux distro. But yeah if you want to change to Linux it is not just the desktop that changes, it is a whole philosophy that opens up a new world if you are curious.

I am an Arch gamer too. Use the zen kernel for slightly better performance. I installed most of the stuff the steamdeck brings. So gamemode, mangohud, protonup qt. I tweaked some settings for better performance. There is that one Tool for Steam Deck that sets some performance tweaks, I forgot the name but should be easy to find.