This is the way. I always recommend people to get their feet wet with the live boot. I’ve been using Linux for almost 3 decades. Live boot is the easiest way to find out what will work for you. I’m not a Mint user, but it’s great for the people who like it; best part about FOSS.

Hilarious that’s still a thing. Back in the late 90’s and early 00’s, I had a buddy that would format and reinstall Windows and all his games and applications religiously, once a month. Seems like something would have done about this after all these years.

Pretty sure, it’s a Gnome Shell extension for active workspaces.

I gamed on it when Proton magically made it so games I bought on Steam worked. Otherwise I just gamed on an Xbox before that. I only recently switched to popos, (still gaming on it). I started on Slackware 3.4 and switched to Ubuntu in 2006-2007. I think as long as you aren’t on the LTS version, you should be good. In any case, it’s not a permanent decision and seems like every distro is crazy fast at installing these days. Worth a go whatever you try or where ever you land.