Though there are several answers already, I will weigh in on my 2 cents.

1. Proton in steam is fairly good. I haven't had much problems with most of my games other than the game window not keeping the cursor captive, so you can move your cursor to another monitor and that can be annoying, depending on the games controls. I don't play very resource intensive games, but I would assume for same hardware, you will have less graphics performance than native Windows. But it is to the point where I don't even bother to check the ProtonDB before buying a game for Windows.

2. Something most people haven't mentioned is that Linux has a NTFS driver (the default windows filesystem). So you should be able to read and write to your Windows partition. Though I think there are data integrity concerns writing to NTFS, though I did this for over a year when I was dual booting without issue. It might be worth having a small FAT partition for writing files to, because Linux can read the Windows partition, but Windows can't read Linux file systems.

3. I will boost Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop environment. It is Ubuntu based, so most packages, software, and online fixes for your issues for Ubuntu will work on Mint. But Cinnamon is much similar to Windows interfaces than most of Ubuntu's desktop environments.

4. One thing I will mention (with the disclaimer that it has been several years since I have installed Mint or a Ubuntu-based distribution), is that you should be looking for a checkbox during the install for installing proprietary drivers and codecs. You can install them yourself later, but from my experience, if you check that it will usually do a good job detecting and installing proprietary drivers for your hardware (wifi card, graphics card, etc.) and all the proprietary drivers for music, video, etc. and your hardware and media should then all work out of the box. I assume since you are currently using Windows you are not opposed to including some proprietary software.