Linux

Debian stable. You'll be fine.

Catchy and then Arch when you learned 👍

Might just be my old experience (happy to learn otherwise) but dual booting ended up with more of a painful experience than not. When Windows would update, it would fuck my grub up and cause issues booting into Linux and Windows. You can fix it (most of the time) but expect to do it rather often; especially unpleasant as a beginner.

I know there's issues with GPU passthrough on vms but IDK if dual booting is the moves unless they seriously improved the experience in the last couple years.

The biggest problem with Linux distros is choice paralysis. I’d recommend Fedora/(K/X)Ubuntu/Mint as a first choice.

Fedora is very up to date, so if you’re giddy to try new desktop environment updates (like gnome, KDE, not Cosmic until it’s more mature), then go Fedora with the spin you think you’ll like the most, visually.

Ubuntu is updated all at once every year/2 years or so. By the time an update reaches Ubuntu, it’s already old news. It’s much more stable because there’s less to diagnose, and everything is essentially worked out before it hits your PC.

Mint is Ubuntu, but heavily modified with user friendly changes in mind. From what I’ve seen though, the default theme is really dated, visually, and may not have creature comforts (I haven’t used mint in over a decade).

Bazzite is for you if you are afraid to brick your computer with a stray terminal command; it’s designed to be very resilient to beginner mistakes by taking away root access from the user.

CachyOS/Endevour (Arch based) are great distros, but you’ll be given a laundry list of choices for everything from your web browser, desktop environment, terminal, shell, file browser, and more. If you’re new to Linux, there’s simply too much choice for things you won’t understand yet. Even if you’re into customization, you’re better off trying one of the above as a baseline and going down the customization rabbit hole from there!

I can't really tell you what will work for you, but I took a similar starting path...

When I finally took linux seriously as my Primary OS a few years ago, I too picked LMDE, and generally thought it was good. I eventually moved on because I wanted access to newer stuff like Nvidia drivers.

My next distro was Fedora KDE Edition, and.tjis would be my generic recommendation for anyone coming from Windows. Rolling updates isn't scary, actually it means you don't have a terrifying big upgrade looming on the horizon.

About a year ago I started hand-crafting my own Hyprland on Arch setup. It's great. Bleeding edge stuff, and contrary to the memes it's actually been the easiest to maintain - possibly because I only have the packages I need. BUT I wouldn't recommend this for someone without a software engineering background.

I also dabbled withe EndeavourOS which deserves a shout.

Have you tried kdenlive? https://youtu.be/9dIqJDy78TI

i'm not on CachyOS, but whenever i asked how somebody got a game to work on linux, the response was Cachy.

I'm on Artix and Debian. Like you wrote, it's impossible to get some games to run on Debian based distributions (i don't care enough about games, so i won't be changing my OS

Ubuntu is Debian based. Won't be any better than LMDE.
Endeavour won't give you anything basic Arch can't.

Cachy is modified for gaming, iiuc. If i had to reinstall on our desktop today, i would go with Cachy.