When in the past I gamed allot, you always were stuck with Windows as hardly any games where released for Linux.
First time I experienced Linux (actually BSD UNIX) was at school trying to cook C++ stuff but even then I wasn't into it deep.
Even when I found a cheap laptop running some Linux distro (never found the owner), I didnt dig deeper as I couldnt get network up because of my n00b status.
Then at one time, a customer gave me this pizza box:
https://www.frontiercomputercorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/IBM-eServer-xSeries-330.jpg
So I had to find a purpose for it and first thing that sprung to mind was ... yeaaaah Game server.
But it wasnt powerful enough to run Windows and a proper Battlefield server (two single core 1GHz CPU's).
So thats when I started digging deeper into Linux (Suze at the time).
With trial and error I learned allot.
Now I realize what I missed out on and why the heck didnt I drop Windows for most of the tasks way way earlier.