Customization is surprisingly easy. But if you are new to Linux, you want a foundation to build upon. So initial look&feel, behavior,usability and even familarity (looks like windows, button does the same) were much more important for me during the first days.
Not contradicting, just letting our young grasshopper know they are not stuck once a distro is chosen. 
I got what you meant. I fully know that Linux is about customization as well, much like my other rabbit hole I found, mechanical keyboards.
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I’ve heard mixed things about whether the paid versions contains all of the codecs tbh, and I don’t have the funds to throw that amount of money at something just to find out. Not when handbrake or ffmpeg is also free and transcoding is easy.
I’m not a power user, i swapped to linux 4 years ago everything worked out of the box for me… i’m a Photoshop CS6 slave tho, but i use a Virtual machine for that. I don’t play Triple A games, PoE/League and WoW all work in Linux. I swapped to linux to play with it, but to be honest i don’t do anything fancy, just works. I never used Powershell on Windows but i do use a lot of terminal automation stuff… idk was fun at the start but now i don’t even poke inside it that much anymore. I don’t even tell anyone that i’m on Linux anymore because i don’t have compatibility issues with anything main stream.
I maintain that between Settings, the many different interfaces of Control Panel (often going way back to 3.11), the Command Prompt, PowerShell AND digging around with the registry that Windows is far more complex to deal with as a power user. Anything that is not immediately trivial is much harder on Windows than in Linux.
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Do you specifically need Photoshop CS6? There are at least two scripts for installing Photoshop CC. Gictorbit similarly has an Illustrator installer script as well.
I’d like to add ZorinOS and FerenOS to the list. Both of them have great customization for GNOME and KDE respectively. I’m now pretty confident that regardless which of the two big DEs I use, I could get it to look and work the way I want it even from scratch, thanks to learning from those two as well as Manjaro-GNOME and Garuda Linux.
For Gamepass, I’d recommend learning dual-boot GRUB from Garuda. I think they use something like os-prober-btrfs and grub-btrfs so they manage to detect even Windows install on a separate HDD out of the box.
But otherwise, putting Windows on a small partition on a separate HDD is pretty safe from my experience. Linux kernel 5.15 seems to be getting major NTFS support upgrade, so it might be viable to have a shared NTFS partition for media or something. Currently, the main issue for me with NTFS is running programs from the Linux side - so I can’t just put my games on NTFS for sharing between Linux and Windows.
OBS has gotten pretty good - you can install it from the GUI software centers. Mind, I only use it for recording, but last I heard they have equalized more features between Linux and Windows build. For editing, while kdenlive is the often go-to recommendation, I have heard a lot of issues with it. DaVinci Resolve is the better one, but if you’re going with free, you have to learn some setup hassles first (there are many videos for it though).
Overall, I think it’s viable, but it depends on how much you rely on Windows stuff. For now, I recommend keeping a dual boot and just shrinking your Windows partitions. Try to see if a full Linux workflow suits you, but have the option for a hybrid if it doesn’t.
I’d recommend starting out with a friendly Ubuntu-base like Zorin OS while getting your feet wet, then try out 5.15 with NTFS partition using Arch-base like Manjaro or Garuda. One setup you can do would be to have OBS record output to the NTFS partition, and then edit it on WIndows, if the DaVinci or Kdenlive workflow doesn’t suit you.
I strongly recommend this blog for video editing on Linux : https://passthroughpo.st/ . They’re not particularly active, but they have good backlog of articles for the subject. Their Adobe CC and Autodesk alternative article is particularly extensive.
I agree, it is a pain. Sure, on fast modern systems you can theoretically switch over in literally under a minute… but there’s just something psychological about that big of a complete context switch that just makes you say “why use Firefox on Linux when I can keep using it on windows right now”. And what happens is you just end up sticking with windows and all your important files and links are on it instead and you never invest the time to make your distro give you what you really want from it.
Also, windows likes to destroy grub every once in a long while after certain updates. I don’t recall exactly what is going wrong, but it’s 2021 and it still fucking happens so I’m forever confining windows to VM’s, besides my work provided laptop.
I’ve been using the kde spin of fedora Linux for two years now. With Lutris providing broad and easy compatibility for most things, I haven’t missed windows at all (with the exception of a very finicky ancient setup for modding C&C3)
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A man of culture, I see.
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Software wise, OBS and DaVinci would be non-issue
Hardware wise; Blackmagic Design, could become a friend
[Intensity Pro 4K and a bunch of Decklinks, are listed as Linux supported]
From a gaming stand point: Gaming on Linux is great. Only issue I have had recently (past 2 years) was Fall Guys changing their anti-cheat software and breaking the game in Linux. If you are curious about specific games working out of the box with proton, you can check: https://www.protondb.com/
You can also feel free to spin up a virtual machine of a linux distro (might get a lot of conflicting answers as to “the best”, I use Mint and recommend it, Pop and Ubuntu are both friendly and have good documentation too). On the VM, install steam and log in, you can see everything that will natively run.
On the side of video recording aand broadcasting: I use OBS on Linux Mint. Was easy to get up and running, tested with YouTube and twitch historically, all the features appear to work well.
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I’ve been watching a Youtuber that primary’s Archlinux as a daily driver. He uses a KVM setup for running Windows VM’s so that it has hardware access and runs without issue, that how he even plays Apex, Valorant, etc in Windows under Linux. Seems complicated, but worth it if it works well.
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Not complicated and it can be done on Ubuntu, Fedora and other Linux distros too. There are lots of guides on the forum (mostly by Wendell).
try pinguy os 18.04 LTS
everything works right out of the box and they have a great team and very helpful community forum.
Its a great one for anyone migrating from windows.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/pinguy-os/files/
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