I have heard very good things about Apple Music to be fair. With them it’s more about staying away from the big guys you know and give the smaller guys some room, although I generally trust Apple to be more on the decent sides of things than other large tech companies.

While it’s not off the board, I’m unlikely to try them out 🙂

Hm, the the absolute least scary option would be to try it out on a live bootable USB. That’s not difficult, it’s the first step before installing pretty much any modern distro.

The second least but slightly more technically advanced would be to get a second hard drive and install Linux on that completely separately from your windows install. The technical part here is your BIOS will have a default boot drive and will boot from there on start up, so you would need to interrupt the boot and select which OS you want.

I personally went with the second option, as dual booting from the same had drive is a minefield with windows, as they have a tendency to wreck the Linux boot part. But when I swapped, I set the default boot to my Linux hard drive to get in the habit of using it, and if I ever need anything from windows nowadays (only VR) I select that on boot.

How easy is it to get gaming on Debian (as OP mentioned occasional gaming)? I use Popos myself, so all nvidia drivers and gamemode and such works out the box.