Is Pop!_OS a Good Fit for Professional Creative Work, Streaming, and Gaming?

Before changing operating systems, make a checklist of everything you use: applications, plugins, codecs, capture devices, audio tools, GPU drivers, and any work files that need to move between systems. Test each item from a live USB, spare drive, or separate installation. If Linux handles your games, OBS setup, and Blender well but one or two professional applications remain unreliable, dual-booting gives you the least disruptive transition. A VM is best treated as an experiment here, not a guaranteed replacement for Windows.

I’d be cautious about switching completely if these applications are part of your professional work. Adobe software in particular may start or partially function through compatibility layers, but that doesn’t necessarily make it dependable for production. Linux is worth experimenting with, but keep a Windows installation available until you’ve confirmed that your projects, plugins, hardware acceleration, color management, and export formats all work properly. The specific distribution matters less than choosing a current one with the desktop and hardware support you prefer; Pop!_OS isn’t inherently unusable or obsolete.

For your workload, I wouldn’t rely on a virtual machine as the main way to run Adobe and other GPU-heavy creative applications. Without a dedicated secondary GPU and proper passthrough, performance and compatibility could be frustrating. A dual-boot setup is usually more practical: use Linux for gaming, streaming, and native applications, then boot into Windows whenever you need Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, or another tool that doesn’t work reliably through Wine or Proton. Blender runs natively on Linux, and you can also investigate Linux-native alternatives for the other programs. Pop!_OS can work, but Fedora KDE, Nobara, or another polished KDE/GNOME distribution may provide a smoother desktop experience. Try Linux from a USB or on a separate drive before committing, and test your actual workflow rather than just checking whether an application launches.