Really I think a temporary dual boot to test everything would be the sanest option, and then when you’re ready to commit, back up your home folder and repartition your drive accordingly. If you end up never ready to commit, well, second-gen Ryzen is officially supported on Windows 11 as long as you enable fTPM and Secure Boot in your BIOS.

Here’s a few pointers based on what I’ve found out:

1. The desktop environment or WM is important. Given your need for Steam Link to work I’d suggest using one with X11, as last I checked Steam Link just gives you a black screen and audio under Wayland. Linux Mint would carry over your knowledge of apt while maintaining an interface that’s pretty familiar to Windows users and is I believe still an X11 distro for now.
2. I got the EA app working using Bottles but it constantly feels like a cat-and-mouse game fixing it whenever it has an update. I basically stopped using it altogether for that reason. Not trying to scare you off — it’s just not a great experience.
3. Play with drivers for your GPU. The situation with Nvidia is, I’m told, not as dire as it once was on Linux but still needs more work than AMD or Intel graphics to work well. The proprietary driver may still give the best experience on games, though Nouveau seems to be doing very well. This is admittedly something I need to come back to in order to confirm (I have one machine with Nvidia graphics and it’s in storage specifically because Nvidia graphics under Linux were such a pain).

I think their joke was that Thinkpad Arch users (at least online) have a strong correlation with trans women