I was in the sane situation as you and what I did was buy a new drive to put Linux on so I could dual boot and get used to things without wiping everything. Linux can even mount your Window drive if you need to access data on it.
I tried a few distro myself but landed on Garuda Dr460onized Gaming. (You can look at different versions here) The gaming version came with steam and Heroic installed and had a nice colour theme picked. Gaming has been great and all Windows games that I’ve tried have worked better than when I was running Windows. (Rocket League, Hades 2, Uncharted 4 to name some) You can always keep Windows on your other drive and boot it for games like Fortnite that have kernel level anti cheat.
The only issue you might have is that Garuda is pretty bleeding edge with when updates get applied. This can be good or bad. There were some issues getting dual screens working for me at first, but those issues have gone away completely now. I also had issues with the top menu bar crashing and disappearing. Lasted about 2 weeks and then an update fixed it. (Survived by using the Meta + Spacebar search launcher and Ctrl + Alt + T to get into a terminal) So updates to fix issues come out somewhat quickly, but issues pop up too. I actually think it’s been pretty stable right now.
How does that help you with a border crossing?