Alright, as much as I want to give Microsoft the double birds and leave, way too many modding programs are .exe based.
And I just cannot yet be fucked to learn how to do per-app emulation. It scares me, things just sort of work here, and I can give them one and a half birds by removing almost all their telemetry garbage.
That being said I do really like the idea of Linux, I just want a little bit more idiot friendliness out of it
I have a Windows VM specifically for that purpose. Game directories are mounted as network drives. The only issue is that I can't use hardlink deployment in Vortex, but Nexus is making a new app to replace it that might have a Linux-native release.
I use Virtualbox's shared folders, they appear as network drives in the guest machine. It hasn't given me any trouble, but like I said, it's limited to what you can do with a network share on Windows, so no links.
Yeah, modding you mostly have to do manually, but it's pretty easy. Most modern games that's just moving a bunch of folders into a folder the game has. Nexus is working on a Linux version though so hopefully that'll be ready soon, which should cover the majority of games.
As for running the games (not emulation, WINE stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator), you don't really have to do anything. They almost all just work. You just click play through Steam (or whatever you're using to play, Lutris is a good option outside of Steam) and they launch, just like in Windows. You can choose to tweak things, but there's no real need unless you want to do something weird.
It's more idiot friendly than you'd expect. You just have to enter it knowing it isn't Windows, so some thing will work differently than Windows. If you expect identical behavior to Windows then it can be annoying. You had to learn Windows at one point too, and you'll have to learn how your Linux environment behaves too.
I would recommend something with KDE (a desktop environment), because it's easy to use coming from a Windows user. Maybe Fedora. Just try it with a live USB and see how it feels. You don't even have to install it immediately.
I personally wouldn't recommend KDE unless you like customization and modding. It has lots of configuration options that can prove overwhelming. It also often prioritizes new features over completing existing ones.