Yeah with the guis, you don't really need to know much, they work pretty much like windoze and OSX. The choices can be overwhelming, though.
But, sounds like you're going to dick around with it quite a lot, so you'll need to brush up on your command-line, posix lingo. Not impossible, and possibly easier if you never knew any DOS.
I use it a lot on a Chromebook, but that's kind of a virtual machine and hardware issues are taken care of.
Historically, the problem with Linux was hardware/driver issues. Not insoluble by any means, but takes some knowledge of drivers, settings, and command-line Fu to tweak those config files. I'm not sure where Linux is on that these days.
And, gaming could be something of an issue. A lot of things can be run using Wine or other windoze emulators, not sure about where Linux gaming stands, though.
You could try it out on a dual-boot system, maybe. At one time, windoze was pretty actively hostile to a second boot partition, though.