If you have a laptop and a desktop put it on the laptop fully rather than dual boot

Until proton came out I kept dual booting but I always ended up booting into windows because I didn't know how to do x on Linux

When I just wiped windows completely and put it on my laptop I distro hopped for a bit but never went back

Ended up switching my PC over too after about 6 months and I no longer own any windows machines, nor feel the need to besides the odd firmware upgrade of a peripheral or something

You'll never be wrong by making it dual boot - if you won't need Windows, hooray, but if you will - it's still there, always has been.

dual boot, you never know when will you be forced to use windows again

• and for those who suggest VM, there are situations where its a hassle to make thing work or its impossible all together ( updating bios is one of those )

I jump shipped to arch when I first started out. But I had experience with Linux vms for school already

My recommendation would be dual-boot until you get everything you need working and have had everything working for a month or two under Linux. Then do a full image backup of the Windows partitions with the Windows backup utility and keep it around just in case. After that spin-up a Windows VM for any edge cases you might come across and enjoy Linux.

Using Rufus (https://rufus.ie/en/) and a fast USB thumbdrive, such as Kingston DataTraveler Max - https://www.storagereview.com/review/kingston-datatraveler-max-review, you can make a "Windows To Go" installation.

Now you have a Windows install that you can boot directly from the thumbdrive when the need arise.
Perfect for booting up if your bios can't updated directly from the usb drive and forces you into Windows, or to run that one software you can't replace just yet and that refuses your attempts to run with wine.

Just make sure that it's an ssd usb thumbdrive or it's gonna be too slow to be any use.

Jump ship. If you can make do without windows, do so. It takes away so much of the frustration, and you just learn to let it go when devs won't make linux-compatible binaries: after all, it's basically them telling you they need to be able to spy on you, so why use their app?

Jump ship with us all! 😁 At this point, the very few games that I am leaving behind are only the ones that use anticheat systems that do not work with linux, and I don't think I'll really miss letting a game company rootkit my macine...

I would go the VM route first, and if you run into any troubles then you still always have the option of installing a 2nd hard drive for bare-metal windows dual boot later. If you do need to dual boot, I don't recommend partitioning one hard drive. Windows isn't good at sharing.

If you're new to linux and unsure about what distribution to install, there are plenty of better sources online with distro recommendations. I tend to use Debian on server/headless and Fedora for desktop/laptop. But I will say, picking an option with the KDE/Plasma desktop environment will probably be the easiest transition. It should feel and look pretty familiar to what you are used to with Windows and many distros offer an installation for KDE/Plasma.

I left windows years ago. I only need it for a couple really restrictive apps, so I dual boot, but I only boot in every few months.

I stopped playing games that use aggressive anticheat as well. 99% of the games I was playing work great, all I lost really was Fortnite and destiny 2, which is worth my sanity dealing with Windows nonsense.

I e been telling people who switch to; think of it like moving house. When you move to a new house, the bathroom isn't in the same place and the kitchen is different, it's up to you whether the new location is better or not. If you expect your new house to have all the same rooms in all the same places as your old house you'll always be disappointed the whole time. Linux is a different house, pick a house that suits your needs and you'll be happy.

Dual boot and give it a shot.

I'd say dual boot. Jumping ship from windows to linux without it is very hard, especially if you enjoy playing a windows-only game or rely on windows-only software. A virtual machine can work for some basic software, but you need to do GPU passt trough to the VM to be able to game at all, which is a... let's just say not insignificant amount of messing around and configuring stuff.