Here's a bootable flash drive with Mint.

Play around and see if you like it. If you do, use the install program on the desktop.

Wouldn't that just cause more problems?

I used Linux for about a week, every game ran way faster (60 instead of 20 fps on ultra detail) - but all games were very unstable and crashed frequently (despite the clear performance advantage.)

I also had troubles getting the low latency kernel working properly for music production. I just could not figure it out. Something to do with WineASIO, JACK audio and pulseaudio. FL studio worked flawlessly, though some fonts were missing ('easily' fixed using winetricks and installing them)

On windows, all I had to do was install the focusrite drivers.

So for now, until these apps and devices have native support, I unfortunately am stuck with windows :(

A lot of these problems could be attributed to my computer specs, it's a bit older:

8gb ram (plan to upgrade to 16 which is the laptops max), GTX 1050 ti, 2.8-3.4ghz i7

It goes the opposite way when I have a problem and asking for help on linux

Just built a pc from scratch and installing Manjaro was absolutely easy, the drivers just worked on install, no fiddling required.

I went back to my Windows partition due to some performance issues with a specific game and it's pretty frustrating to deal with. Icons on my taskbar I can't get rid of, os hassling me about signing up for Microsoft products and overall a bit of a less polished experience than my Linux install out of the box.

Friend: *has computer problems

This but when people use proprietary apps.

...your brain will hate you