Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?
Not greatly. The games that have anti-cheat won’t work on Linux. Anti-cheat is a security problem anyway (because they circumvent the kernel policies) and so linux will never support these.
Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?
for the ones that work yes. There’s a list of how well games work on linux, there’s a website for that.
If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?
For some “difficult” non-anti-cheat games there are some workarounds. If we’re talking about apps and not games, then it’s best to use the Linux equivalents, and forget the Windows ones.
Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?
While there’s WINE and .NET for Linux, Windows apps don’t really work well. They usually break on new wine versions, or they don’t work at all. For apps, use Linux native apps. Games generally work better than apps because they don’t use too many of the Windows APIs (they’re mostly 3D stuff, and not app apis).
How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?
It depends on the distro. Some distros have graphical front ends, some you have to use the terminal to update the OS.
How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?
There’s ClamAV, and also you should be turning the firewall On (some distros come with it, others you have to install it manually). Don’t downloads random binary packages, only from the distro itself, or official packages.
Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?
Overall, yeah… but it does depend on the version of the driver, distro you’re using, hardware etc. I use Intel graphics cards (dedicated) because I find their drivers to be more mature than nvidia’s, for example.
Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?
Very unlikely, near zero.
And also, what distro might be best for me?
Everyone is recommended to start with Linux Mint, because it’s the distro with the most GUI front-end tools to do stuff. Yes, there are some distros that are more game-oriented, but they expect the user to know what they’re doing. Start with Mint.
That is a too old of a laptop. In reality, modern Linux distros run well in anything newer than 10-15 years. Yes, there are distros that you can install into it, but they won’t be the latest and greatest distros of today. They’d be instead distros made specifically for old computers, and these distros are usually more complex because they lack all the gui tools found on newer distros.
First you need to find out if your CPU is 32bit or 64 bit, and if it can take a minimum of 2 GB of RAM (if yes, upgrade it too). Then, I’d suggest you download the right file from here: https://www.q4os.org/downloads1.html I find Q4OS to be the best for old computers (more gui tools), but you’d need that minimum of 2 GB of ram to load a browser and be comfortable with 3-5 tabs (no more than that though or you’ll hit the swap). Also, consider Falkon or Chromium as a browser, they use less ram than firefox (people have downvoted me for saying that in the past, but it’s my experience).
Personally, I’d get a used laptop for $150 from the last 10 years, and install Linux on that. It should be way faster than your Asus laptop. Just make sure it has 8 GB of RAM to be comfortable with modern Linux distros (Linux Mint can work adequately with 4 GB of RAM, unless you want to do video editing).