Linux or Windows?

I would verture to say that not all of your games currently work on Linux but with the Steam Machine coming out soon many of them may soon be supported. You cannot natively run ms based software like office without a compatibility layer app like wine and even then they still may not work correctly, however there are many open source and web based alternatives to office and other popular apps that run on Linux based systems.

As for your hardware, it looks like it is using broadcom ethernet and wifi, both are possible to run but you will have to get the drivers after the installation (due to licensing issues with broadcom) which can be hard without internet access. In most cases the hardware will work out of the box, the major exceptions are broadcom networking, realtek networking and cheap printers.

For your specific uses at this time windows looks like your best option, but if you have a free disk space consider installing a Linux based distro along side of windows as a dual boot system and trying it out for yourself.

Instead of using MS office you can use things like calligra, libreoffice, goffice or even google drive from browser.

playonlinux has a database that you can use to search the operational status of games, but the steam games that are incompatible will not be downloaded.

Yes you can download the drivers to usb and install manually or get an external wifi card that supports linux and use that. Before you go looking for the alternate options I recommend doing a test installation and seeing what does and does not work, there is a chance that the wired could work out of the box.

As you are a gamer and looking at using steam I recommend checking out ubuntu since that is the distro that steam is officially supporting and testing on.

To start off you need to download the ubuntu ISO image and write it to disk, this will not be a data write, but you need to make the disk by using the write image to disk option in your cd/DVD writer program. Once it is on disk you will need to shrink the primary windows partition to make installation space, reboot the computer with the distro disk in the drive, then choose the install option and choose to install along-side windows.

Alexander Stephen wrote:

"It seems that I will decline the idea of switching to linux and I will wait for SteamOS. I hope that will come soon."

That won't do you any good, since SteamOS is Linux-based, all the games that will work on it, will also work on regular Linux distributions. My situation is pretty similar to yours, so I can tell you what I did.

I got 2 disks, don't worry though you can do it with one too.

I installed Windows on one disk, cleaned it, turned off many services, effects, etc..In other words, made it gaming-only.

On the other disk I installed Linux Mint 16, and installed everything else on it, which includes, Music, Videos, all the programming stuff, and LibreOffice.

I've been doing this for quite a while, and from my experience it's a great way to combine both systems into what they're currently most useful at. (And of course when games are released on Linux I play them on Linux and delete them from Windows because Linux is awesome! )