i often play gta online with two friends who use windows. they have crashes, sounds disappearing, issues joining sessions and they keep falling through ground. on mint my only problem is no cursor in social club. my framerate is not great though, 80 - 100 vs on windows it stays above 120. except for the random massive lag spikes.
a cheap e-fatbike. it’s almost free to ride and it has a decent range of about 30 km without pedaling so it gets me anywhere i need to go. i regret that i didn’t get one that has studded tires available, riding on ice is scary (finland). it also squeaks on bumpy roads like an old bed…
yes partitioning is the correct term, and windows already has a tool for managing disks. you should find it as disk management or something similar. then as you install linux, it should give you the option to install alongside windows. but for this to work you need the usb drive to be flashed correctly as gpt or mbr depending on which one your windows has (type “list disk” in cmd and see if theres * under gpt), and rufus lets you choose this for your distro, so pick the same one. i have heard windows updates may wipe the bootloader, but you should be able to just install it back if that happens. i never update as i only use windows for my school stuff anyway. linux will not wipe windows unless you choose to do so in the installer.
i live in finland, we have bike lanes everywhere. it’s often shorter and faster to use an e-bike if you own one, especially during rush hour. but the new problem is that dumb people have bikes too! i get even angrier on a bike than behind a wheel.
my experiece is that with nvidia you can’t just choose which distro you want to use, you need to try them out and find the one that works. for me mint cinnamon worked great out of the box, i use the xanmod kernel on it because of load balancing. i’m still very much a noob but i have almost completely ditched windows, only need it for excel and word. also pop os gets praise for playing nicely with nvidia. not sure if running on vm can cripple something in the system, have you tried booting from a live usb?