I moved away from Windows few months ago, and i would recommend linux mint, its easy, stable and beginner friendly. And you can of course Distro Hop to another distro. And with steams proton or wine (almost) every game can be run! For those few that doesnt run good or at all, you can still dual boot windows and linux mint.
Yup, and if some bad software wants to create malicious webserver they can not do it as all the ports that are open are used in a legit way. And thus can not really communicate either one or the other way.