You can use one GPU and hot swap it to pass through when booting your windows VM

Having had similar hardware and reading about your preferences let me throw some cents in the hat:

Sim stuff runs mostly ootb. I don't have a fancy rig, but both my G29 and x52 pro work perfectly fine. At most, some games will map the axis wrong, but that's easily fixable (eg. AMS2 swaps clutch and brakes and inverts all axis). The insullary apps such as TrackIR and controller stuff is already available, although not official. There's Oversteer for wheels and GX52 for hotas.

I don't have a TrackIR device but I've used FacetrackNoIR with the neuralnet face tracker and besides needing a bit of background lighting, it woked fine.

It's not all perfect and depending on the games, it might need some tinkering. For example Mechwarrior 5 refuses to work properly with my hotas, and when I had a weaker CPU, Beam.ng was unusable with traffic/opponents. Some older titles are a pain to set up, like the older WRC games that had some obscure config files for the mappings. The upside is that you can back up your "fake windows C:" (aka as compatdata folder) once you got everything the way you like it.

I mostly do office type stuff and vector graphics along with CNC, and the proprietary software I need runs 90% fine on wine/bottles, so I haven't had much of any blocker issues with work stuff.

I've been running Linux way before proton was a thing, and I'm really happy about how things are moving nowadays. I got used to the gnome workflow and now any other OS feels cumbersome and clunky, but YMMV.

TL; DR:

• PRO: most sim stuff just works
• CON: some games perform a bit worse
• PRO: most hardware runs OOTB and popular gear have apps for setup and options
• CON: those are unofficial and might not support all bells and whistles
• CON: some games are finnicky to set up, especially with external software addons (eg crewchief, ED companion, TrackIR)
• PRO: you can save your games prefix so all that work is portable/reproducible
• most office stuff is more than adequate for everyday work.

You'll definitely be struggling with that GPU, so maybe that's a no-go.

Yeah gtav might struggle in Linux. ProtonDB shows its a tough config. Dual boot is probably your only option if that's a deal breaker. Sharing my experience, I had a game i was playing that required windows and I was dual booting for a while, as well as a 3d slicer that the only profile for a printer I own is still windows. Everytime windows updated it seemed to have a good chance of wrecking the bootloader. After about the third time that happened I just stopped doing that, wiped windows and ran fedora.

As of today, I have spent time trying to make that slicer profile work in Linux, got it most of the way there and got frustrated, so instead I repurposed an old laptop that gets powered on only for that one specific printer.

Every game I play now runs on Linux.

At the moment, just VirtualBox for simplicity, but have run flat KVM for similar things in the past. It is FAR from ideal, but better than fucking with dual booting for myself. Also breaks a lot with Nvidia hardware.