By skyforbes 
I don't "hate" Windows 11, but I'm not the biggest fan of it, either. I've grown used to it over the past ~2 years, especially since it's also what my work uses, but I preferred Windows 10 (seemed to work faster), *vastly* preferred Windows 7, and *tremendously prefer* many of the ways that older Windows (XP, 98SE…) worked.
Heck, I even miss having a "desktop" full of categorized windows a la 3.0/3.1.
I primarily use my home desktop for gaming (new and old, including emulation and weird hardware), though I *do* work on it a few times a week in a whole bunch of applications ranging from basic Microsoft Office to Articulate Storyline to Unity Engine and more. I make little VR/AR demos, *tons* of presentations, create/edit audio/video content, and work with far-too-many spreadsheets. And so on.
Windows 11 is fine for this, but sometimes it just feels like there're slowdowns and possibly even memory issues that arise that didn't before. Some games run slower and worse (Final Fantasy XV, for example, is one I'm playing now and it's having memory issues that it never did with Windows 10).
Some gamers online have recommended that I just switch to some Linux build for gaming and dual-boot, but that seems like a lot of work. I'm not entirely-unwilling to do it, but I haven't notably used Linux for like, twenty years, and it's my understanding that I'd have to jump through hoops to (at least initially) get all my Windows games on Steam/GOG/whatever to run correctly. I'd honestly need a step-by-step *guide*, and that's after "choosing the distro I think is right for me," which I don't really even know how to start with that at this point.
My question(s):
– What can I do to "optimize" Windows 11 for gaming(/the other stuff I mentioned above)?
– Are there any non-system-intensive modifications that you'd recommend to make it look/operate a little more like "old-school-Windows"? (Fences seemed cool, but I had issues with it crashing a while back so I uninstalled it)