Performance-wise it's the same, roughly. Maybe a bit slower because the game-critical drivers receive slightly less love from developers.
Video drivers tend to be slightly worse, but not by a lot, as of the past few years both nVidia and ATI have been pretty on-top of driver bugs, nVidia optimus has a few gotcha's though.(newer drivers work out of the box without any configuration but if you want the full power saving mode of switching between the intel i965 and the nv card there's a bit more you need to install) In general anything cpu or memory bound will be faster on linux and anything GPU heavy will be faster on windows, in practice most things even out to be pretty unnoticably different. nVidia and Valve in particular have been putting a LOT of money in linux development lately. Weirdly a considerably large percentage of windows-only games actually have better framerates running through proton then natively on windows.
Usability-wise the plain surface is fine, nearly up to par with recent Windowses. There's a million little and large bugs, though, everything aside the actual kernel is a rarely-maintained, laughable mess of clutches. If you're familiar with the command line and know your way around googling strange issues in config text files, it's fine.
This is a little outdated, most major projects (window managers, etc) are agressively maintained to the point where major changes are actually HARD to push through, there's been a shift over the last 10 years to long term support of interfaces/api's. If you stick to a major distro unless you have some really odd hardware it's unlikely you'll ever need to open a terminal window.
On the plus side: the ever-present annoyance of forced logins, malware attempts, "download clients" and every shitty little dev company trying to push their splash screens in your face is a lot less annoying on Linux. And a lot of programs these days are simple HTML/javascript shitballs bundled to a browser, so they're huge, they're slow, but at least they offer the very same experience you'd get on Windows.
Agreed, and I'd suggest on a linux system using firefox and NOT chromium, chromium runs like ass in comparison.
So if you got wife and child, you don't have the time to get comfortable, and I suggest staying on Windows. If you have some spare time to solve issues not correlated to your actual intentions, Linux is a nice alternative which tends to get comfortable over time.
Really true with anything of course, it's not that there's issues with either that are that different, it's just....different. Linux does though allow ANYTHING to be customized so getting too ambitious too early you can pretty easily shoot yourself in the foot and screw up your system, so a good rule for early use is not to TOUCH the "su" or "sudo" commands (or their graphical counterparts) unless you're absolutely sure you know what you're doing, those prompts for the root password mean business, once root you will NOT be prevented from breaking anything you want to.
I would like to point out though that anyone who thinks a windows install and configure is easy has been using too many pre-configured systems with their rescue disks, a fresh windows install even on 10 is still a painful exercise of going all over the internet and downloading zip files of drivers, putting them on a thumb drive (often only being able to use the usb 1.1 or usb 2 ports as the usb 3 port needs a newer driver), and 300 reboots as you install one of them at a time. While my experience is of course ancedotal and I will disclose that I know linux FAR better than I know windows I've recently installed both on this laptop (I couldn't get win10 working in a VM for testing so gave up and upgraded my laptop's m2 drives from a single 128 gig to two 500 gigs) and the linux build just WORKED with all the hardware and the windows one took me a solid day of hunting and pecking, downloading shit to my phone and copying it over to get all the hardware up. (though I STILL can't enable listen to microphone on my headset and can't figure out why)
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