I had a dual boot where windows would from time to time rewrite the boot and the system would just load into it.
Because it was an older motherboard it still had IDE and SATA; after some research, I found someone saying it was a BIOS “feature” where the default master HDD was alway on the IDE channel. The solution: get rid of the IDE disk (and windows along with it).
The rest of what you describe remembers my own misadventures when I started. But back then at 2006 and with Debian.
I’ve read articles where people were saying that even running the NVidia Quadro boards was very much anti-climatic, with the biggest hurdle being installing the proprietary drivers.
And when it comes to games, WINE is going very far to make many things works where they were never intended to. And many titles are already being shipped with penguin in mind