I have a very similar use case to you, and when I built my PC I just never installed Windows on it. Linux is a great development environment (imo strictly superior to Windows but ymmv), and gaming is almost flawless with Proton. Only problems with that has been from the immature RX 9070 XT drivers, so not too bad.

Depending on what you program with I’d highly recommend exclusively using a Linux VM for it. Then you can fully switch once you’re comfortable working out the kinks.

Someone’s made a comparison of a few ROMs here.

Personally, I’d recommend GrapheneOS like the other commenters have here, but do your own research!