Well… Your three (five) requirements before abandoning Windows for Unix, have already the outright mention that the majority will require WINE.
For the absolute intent of running primarily Windows applications under Linux (for reasons sounding like social acceptance), it seems so much akin to going vegan as long as there are indistinguishable alternatives to chicken, fish, beef, pork, and horse.
…meat.
If you’re going to dual boot as a long term solution, you may as well stay on windows.
It sounds great, until you realise you need to do twice as many system updates, and every time you want to play a game and reboot, windows update wants to fuck with you. You also blow through way more disk space than you’d otherwise need.
Also, it is way too tempting to just boot into windows if something is anything other than “brain numbingly simple”, which means you just never end up switching properly.
It might be a reasonable crutch to evaluate linux and/or do some initial learning if you’re committed enough to learn linux, but it’s not a worthwhile long term solution.
I did the dual boot thing for a very long time, and i was a network admin dealing with linux via command line building/maintaining email/web proxy boxes with Debian for years (back before PC VMs were a thing).
If you need a specific application for school or work and it wont run acceptably in a VM your choices are find something that is good enough to do the job under linux, or stay on Windows IMHO. There’s basically no point running Linux in a VM in my opinion, you’re using Windows for the host anyway, may as well do stuff in Windows.
Not like this please 
Another way to switch to linux may be to get a netbook or other cheap second PC and run it exclusively on THAT.
I’d suggest that’s better than trying to dual boot a single box:
I guess I’ll put my two cents in also.
Don’t just rush into Linux. Period. Trust me it’s not easy. I did it for a year, and until I got hardware that worked well with Linux I had a hell of a time.
But I stuck with it, and I mainly only use Windows now for two or three applications that simply refuse to work with Wine or Proton.
I’d like to hit on a note from Thro
I haven’t had much of a problem with Windows screwing up my dual boot. But I use Windows on a second harddrive and whenever I have to update it, I just unplug my Linux drive. (I use a stardock multiple drive bay installed in the front drive bays) My windows drive doesn’t have any of the boot info from Linux at all. And I have my first boot drive as my linux drive when it’s installed. So all the grub info is on the linux drive. Once linux drive is unplugged, windows just assumes it’s a single drive machine.
I actually found it to be pretty easy to transfer most of what I knew from Windows to Linux. Most everything is there. Yes, alot of stuff is different. But if you’re just using it to play the games that will work on Linux, and surf the web, you can use Linux just like Windows for the most part. At least that has been my experience and ABSOLUTELY will not be everyone’s experience.
I concur with everyone else, try it on a separate machine first. Check Linux out, whatever flavor you decide on, and test all your stuff there first. Try out all the programs that are the alternatives to what you use on windows. See if they work for you.
If you try dual boot, please for the love of god use it on a separate drive. Don’t try to dual boot with the same drive. And whenever you have to update windows, if you can help it, disconnect the Linux drive. It will save you ALOT of headaches.
To clarify, by “fuck with you” i mean ruin your gaming experience.
In my case i’d only need to reboot into windows for a couple of specific games which i may play every 2-3 months. Which meant that if i allocated say an hour or so to gaming, i’d spend a bunch of time waiting for Windows update to do its thing plus steam updates, GOG updates, driver updates, etc. etc.
I never had any issues with boot loader getting killed, but every time i had say 1-2 hours to play a game, 30+ minutes would be consumed with general pc janitor work on the windows side.
If you’re in windows a lot, then that’s less of a thing, but the counterpoint to that is “if you’re in windows a lot” then dual booting to linux is mostly pointless 