Smelly you say? May I recommend you apply some Mint with Cinnamon to spruce up that computer of yours?
Take the most popular (for now) distro in Ubuntu, remove the proprietary Canonical stuff that makes people say eww, and give the UI some polish and you basically have Linux Mint. And if you REALLY want to reject Ubuntu in its entirety, they do have LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition).
As a Linux-only person I can totally acknowledge the need for Windows if you want to be a regular player of specific popular games. And maybe VR. I haven't tried it recently after playing a ton of VR a few years ago.
But I can also point out the fact that I probably already own more games than I will ever finish in my adult life, and just in case I do there are also more games released every year that work on Linux that I could ever play. So if a game will not work in Linux even with proton and whatnot, my life is not negatively affected by that game not existing in my world. (I'll admit I probably didn't always think this way, but for a long time I still ran Windows and didn't think about it either way)