Those are great questions! Dualsense is supported through drivers provided by PlayStation and to my best recollection, most features work out of the box. Last I recall, the adaptive triggers weren't functional outside of normal trigger activity and the audio jack doesn't audio. Proton is a tool that Steam/Valve made to make most windows games work within Linux without needing a lot of tinkering. I've had mostly success with it, however some games still won't work, usually due to anti cheat software. There's a website called protondb.com that can be used to check the compatibility of most games and it usually offers tips for getting the best performance depending on the game.

As for the GUI vs CLI question, you'll still have full access to the terminal or command line through the terminal emulator. Think of it like the cmd prompt in Windows. You sacrifice nothing by using a graphical interface and can still do all your terminal work without a GUI if you'd prefer, that's entirely up to your preference. For example, with Ubuntu, you have your software center, which is essentially an app store that you can use to download different programs and/or utilities. You can use that, or you can open a terminal emulator and type in something like "sudo apt install Firefox" and it will do the same thing.

Linux can be as complicated or simple as you want to make it, as the owner of the computer, everything is entirely up to you. You can rely entirely on GUI based applications and never run into a problem. I do a little of both, but I've also got several years of experience tinkering around with things.

I don't know what your current level of proficiency is outside of webdev, but if you're familiar with virtual machines, like VMware, you can spin up a virtual environment and test drive Linux without having to modify your existing computer at all. With this being a shared computer, you could always dualboot it. That's when you have two different operating systems installed at the same time. When you power on your PC, you'll get a menu to pick windows or Linux and can switch by restarting your PC to get back to that menu. Windows files will be accessible in Linux, however Linux files are usually not accessible in Windows.

Drivers are pretty easy, most are already built into the Linux kernel. For Nvidia drivers, you have open source drivers, or proprietary drivers. The open source ones are readily available in almost every distro, and the propriety (better performing) drivers are a few clicks away. Most times, you'll be asked if you want the proprietary drivers during your installation and won't have to mess with them ever again.

I know I hit you with a full essay and a half, and it may seem like a lot, but I promise you it's really not as complicated as people like to make it seem. My elderly mother ran Linux on a laptop I gave her years ago without even noticing for years. If you have questions, there's a million and a half different places to ask, including my DMs. Feel free to shoot me a question, and I'll do a little digging to see what I can teach you.

that's a fair point. I just think the Linux community does itself a disservice by making things seem way more complicated and techy when it's really not that crazy at all. It can be, sure, but that's entirely up to the user