A PS4 can be jailbroken to run Linux. You can then install Steam and Halo and have Halo on Linux on PS4

Shouldn’t do much if you only have 1 other desktop. For example I used Pop!_OS for years which comes with Gnome, but I MUCH prefer KDE Plasma so I had that installed the whole time and just never touched Gnome (it was still there, removing it would have broken stuff).

I think your best bet is Gameboy emulation for gaming, that GPU isn’t gonna be doing any 3D stuff any time soon unfortunately

KDE Neon or Linux Mint will be your best betnfor a Windows-style layout. Just keep in mind it still isn’t Windows so stuff will he different

You may need to move away from Ubuntu to an Ubuntu-based distro. Pop!_OS still packages firefox as a deb

Pretty much any distro will do, but Ubuntu-based ones tend to be easier to use due to having menus and buttons for most everything. As for apps, here are my suggestions

_3D

Blender

_DAW

Ardour

LMMS

Bitwig

~VIDEO EDITING~

Davinci Resolve (if on Nvidia)

Kdenlive

Olive (alpha software, be wary of crashes and save often)

_IMAGES

GIMP

Krita

Photopea (web app)

Inkscape

Lights may be possible with OpenRGB but I haven’t personally messed with these kinda of software

Any parents that suggest D&D are automatically awesome in my book

Start with something designed around a graphical interface, pretty much anything based on Ubuntu will do this (Linux Mint, Zorin, Pop!_OS, etc).

If you use Nvidia Pop!_OS has an ISO file with Nvidia drivers already installed. It isn’t hard to get Nvidia drivers on other distros but the more done for you the better.

Also recommend, refind has saved my dual boot machines more times than I can count

Welcome to dual booting with Windows! Best advice I can give is try to keep Windows away from your Linux drive as it doesn’t like to share. A 2nd drive for your Linux install can save a ton of headache (I went so far as to put Windows on my old PC when I upgraded).

Really hope you got one of the later variants of covid, they got weaker over time so they may not be as bad. I got it too last year despite being vaxxed and while it sucked the first few days it let up fairly quickly.

“Gaming” distros, save for Steam OS as that’s for a console-like device.

Pretty much every distro can play games relatively close in performance to any other distro. The only real difference is how new your GPU drivers are.