I’ve since graduated to scripting stuff to launch through wine (mostly chummer5 for shadowrun) but proton was a great lazy way of doing it

I’m pretty fresh to Linux myself, but as far as I know it’s exclusive to steam. You can launch non-steam stuff through it by adding the .exe to the Steam client, I played Fallout 1 this way

I made the switch 2-3 months ago, and I went with Kubuntu. It’s absolutely fine, but if I knew then what I know now I’d likely have gone pop or mint, just to not bother with snaps (although they’re pretty easy to get rid of).

As others have said, get Ventoy on a USB stick, use that to have a play with a few live environments and get a feel for what desktop environment you might want to use. KDE and Cinnamon I think are pretty good Desktop Environments if you’re used to Windows, but have some fun with it and also try a few that are very different to windows, you might find yourself liking them (I really like using i3 on my laptop where the screen is fairly low res)

Having quit this year (after a long time of cutting down/vaping etc) I think my main advice to you will be this:

If you relapse it isn’t the end of the world, it’s just a bump in the road. Don’t be too hard on yourself, it’s not easy.

Also, keep a pack of smokes or a vape or snus or whatever you use on you for a week or so after you stop using them, so when you feel your pockets you don’t panic when you’re missing something, which will set off the response to “I need nicotine”

Good luck!