What I did was clone my windows drive as a virtual machine on an external drive, like a flash drive, then, I wiped the drive, installed kubuntu, moved the VM back to the drive, and when I run into something that I’m like “I can’t find an alternative to this app on Linux” or “I need a copy of that one thing from my old windows install” I just boot it up, use the app and do what I need, or transfer the file over, and I’m good.

In my case I will admit, I did not wipe the windows drive and ended up dual booting, but not very often, just because I haven’t been able to get a vm to run smooth using virtual manager since I switched, running windows or Linux, pretty sure it’s because of Nvidia and their proprietary driver. If I don’t need GPU, I can use the VM just fine. But for specific games or software, switching to Windows on bare metal is handy.

I’d say the VM thing isn’t the best solution to the problem you’re facing, but it is a solution that can make the transition a little easier, it helped for me anyways, so I figured I’d share.