

with tofu (especially plain soy tofu) the key is the seasoning. Think of it a bit like you would chicken. Marinate it, make a rub, add a sauce… By itself its pretty plain and some people hate what flavour it does have, but it acts like a sponge for seasoning.
Similarly, another incredible protein is Seitan. Basically pure gluten from washing out flour (you can also just get gluten powder to save like an hour of work)
Makes for really good meat imitate especially when folded/braided into different textures.
I’m just writing it assuming someone who has no idea reads this, you did sound like you know veg foods in general.
I used to run Mint and Win7 parallel in uni (gosh, a decade ago?) since we were working with ruby - at the time basically impossible to run and dev under windows.
In matters of development there are almost only advantages, depending on your target platform of course. Bash is great, tools and packages are usually easier to setup than on windows.
For gaming my only linux experience is the Steamdeck. I’ve ran a bunch of non-steam games and Proton (the bridge for windows games under Linux) does all the heavy lifting for you. I only had issues with the Riot launcher, which tended to break when detecting a new update.