seeing a lot of despair around switching to linux, as if people's lives would end if they... stopped playing valorant or league of legends, or started using krita instead of paint tool sai
no change in your workflow or how you enjoy your entertainment is going to be painless, but if you want better, or even just to escape the crunch of ai and the absence of privacy, that's out there, waiting for whenever you're ready
and linux is not perfect, it can never be, nothing will ever be. you'll have to sacrifice some things, like certain games or some proprietary software you use, but that's just how it is. anyone who's worked with proprietary hardware or even just owned an old smartphone, the incompatibility between alternatives is very much deliberate to try and lock you into their ecosystem, that's always been the corporate m.o. and it's why technology sucks and our dependence on it sucks even more. but if you want to free yourself from that the foss is the best thing you can get right now
and if you're completely stuck using some proprietary software that only runs on windows for work: dual-boot! use windows for work and linux for everything else; the important part is to move away from windows and proprietary software as much as you can, and if you can't go all the way, that's fine too.
if you want to make completely sure windows can't snoop on your computer and its files, you can set up a virtual machine, but that can be a lot more complicated depending on your needs