I switched over to Pop!_OS a year ago and I am extremely happy with my choice. I've recently had to go back to dual booting only because sunshine/moonlight streaming games across my home network was having serious issues with Linux--so only the games I want to stream up to my TV box are on windows. I 100% prefer Linux to Windows for everything you've mentioned, and Steam/Epic (Legendary game launcher(?)) has pretty much worked flawlessly. One minor quibble I have is that it is irritatingly hard to get mod managers working consistently, and I enjoy modding many of the games I play (Skyrim, oblivion, fallout, etc,.).
I'm chomping at the bit for the new Rust-based COSMIC desktop to be released by Pop!_OS though. Should be FY24.
I would suggest Seveneves by Neil Stephenson. It is a little bit more grand of a scale of time, but I would say up until the last chapter is pretty "hard" science fiction. Definitely one of the more lasting impressions in scifi for me.
All the OSes running the web servers and client browsers:
"Are we a joke to you??"