Linux

Rather than trying to muck with dual booting, I would recommend picking up a Lenovo T430S or better laptop on Amazon from around 150.00-500.00. Lenovo ThinkPad T series laptops are incredibly well supported by Linux. Then install Linux Mint. This is a great way to get started with a low barrier to entry. As you get better, you can start tinkering with the innards. By getting a cheap spare machine with which to learn Linux on, it will be the least disruptive to you.

Dual booting can be problematic. Windows is the most retarded OS ever which sometimes decides to overwrite boot partition.
FOr trying out stuff, you van install Linux as a virtual machine. Check there if your sw works there and is available.

General tips:

• Don't look for Linux versions of the Windows software you use. Instead look for software that fulfils the same purpose.
• If you're cutting-and-pasting a lot of stuff from those articles, give yourself a check on what those things actually do. See it as a small investment of time to economise time later on, as you'll rely less and less on those articles.
• Stick to popular distros. And for the desktop environment (DE), use whatever works for you.
• Keep it easy. It's fine if you need to log into Windows once in a while, but over time you'll notice yourself doing it less and less.

Pop OS is a good beginner friendly Linux distro. Like Ubuntu, it is also debian based. This would make it easier to get used to for you since you have some experience with Ubuntu.

Kubuntu or Mint are great distro's to begin with when starting your linux journey. It's good to know down the road these should really be moved on from, but they're great to get the ball rollin for sure!

I'm a middle-aged truck driver. I've been using Linux Mint (Cinnamon) now for about seven years as my only operating system (without dual booting) since Windows XP Pro became totally obsolete. Granted, I'm a hobbyist programmer and lifelong computer enthusiast. However, there are definitely some easy to install and use distros out there these days.

As an alternative (and since you need to keep Windows running for now), have you considered downloading VirtualBox and installing linux thee on your desktop? There's a couple of really good reasons behind this... First off, you don't have to mess with switching back and forth when dual-booting, but it also gives you the ability to play with some different distributions and find something that feels more comfortable without having to trash a machine and continuously starting over. You can even load up multiple distros at the same time on your Windows desktop and compare them.

Now for really getting going with linux... It's easier if you don't expect yourself to figure it all out at once. Pick a daily task, like reading your email. Maybe you already use something like Thunderbird, so that's an easy switch. Just shut it down on Windows and start using the linux screen for this every time. Web browsing might also be an easy switch, and you already mentioned you use Gimp. Have you played around with different desktops yet? With linux you can install several and select one of them when you log in, so maybe try KDE, Gnome, or Mate (this one is my favorite because it's fairly light on my older system but still lets me configure a lot). What else can you dive in to? How about configuring your login screen for different options like showing available users or automatically signing you in when you boot up the linux system in virtualbox? There's a lot of configuration you can do by editing files in the /etc/ folder so it pays to get familiar with that aspect of things.

Once you think maybe you found a distro or desktop you like, consider what other things you can do to really start getting familiar with linux. You could change your default shell, or your default command line editor. What about setting up a local DNS cache or maybe your own email relay? Maybe even set up your own web server and database, and use them to develop web pages locally. The point is, once you realize there's no limitations in what you now have available to you, your brain starts thinking about all the things you could do -- and that's where you really start learning how to work with linux. Sure you need to use online guides the first time you set up a web server or something else. Sure you'll have to continue to rely on the web for some time, but as you work through various projects you'll start to remember where you found things, and you'll start to see how they connect to other things, and one day that thing you've been re-typing from your notes suddenly clicks and you understand WHAT that thing was actually doing.

It's never an easy process to start something new. The first time somebody gave me a bunch of old PC parts and I powered up a machine on my waterbed, I looked at the blinking cursor and thought "now what?" (Yeah he didn't even give me a DOS boot floppy!) But here we are thirty-some years later and I'm running servers, troubleshooting multiple operating systems at work, and doing pretty much anything I want. Linux was a complete change of gears but it was totally worth taking the time to figure it out, you just need to work on one piece at a time.

I'm far from experienced in this but from what I heard: Linux Mint.

Then libreoffice for office (I think it's pre installed on Linux Mint). See this https://youtu.be/4qWgrGc4g20

I love when people switch on the same machine and experience a performance boost. They finally start to understand all my under breath muttering about hating windows and it’s geriatric bloatware.

The linux motto to any problem is "it's possible, but here are the pitfalls". You can do almost everything on linux (unlike windows), but the tradeoff is it can sometimes require more time to learn and troubleshoot issues. In my opinion, linux is great for those of us who dislike to use the mouse and take our hands off the homerow. Get used to using the terminal to launch apps, instead of clicking stuff on the desktop. Learn keyboard shortcuts. My recommendation is to use a window manager like i3 with an i3 status bar at the bottom. This will give you a minimal desktop, where you can move windows/tiles around all with keyboard shortcuts. Open apps with something similar to dmenu, where you just have to press a keyboard shortcut and type the first few letters of the app you want to open, and press enter. Learn vim-like keyboard navigation to edit text and reposition the cursor through the text all without the keyboard. Linux integration with this style of experience is vastly superior to Windows and Mac.