/boot: For legacy reasons. In the olden days, BIOS cannot reference any sector that is located higher than 1024 cylinders. Forcing the /boot partition to be on its own and be the first partition created ensures that the necessary files are located below the 1024-cylinder limit. The Linux kernel and the initrd/initramfs image are located here to ensure everything is loaded into memory to start the actual storage drivers for direct access in order to get rid of the slow and limited BIOS for reading data. I am not sure if UEFI solved this issue though...
/home, /var, /usr, ...: Compartmentalize the storage space. For example, if you have an errant user or process that fills up the /home partition, it does not affect /var, where the log files are stored. You can then review the logs in order to investigate what happened. Also, take a look at the /etc/fstab file. Each line has two numbers at the end. One is for dump (an old, old backup program), and the other is to tell the system to fsck on boot (file system check).
It also enables security and/or different file system strategies. For the security example, /boot, /usr, are mostly static (except if you are updating). /home and /var, not so much. In other words, you can configure the system to mount these partitions as read-only on startup, and only remount them read-write before you update.
A useful mount flag is noexec, where you are indicating to the system that it should not honour any binary programs that are marked executable. For example, if a web-uploaded file is stored in /tmp, and there just so happens to be an exploit that remotely triggers the ability to start a program, mounting /tmp with the noexec flag would help keep that from happening. Another example would be if you do not allow your users to run any programs that they download or compile themselves: mount /home with noexec. If there is no reason why a certain mount point should contain runnable programs, it should be mounted with noexec.
For different file system strategies, Gentoo uses portage for their package management system that contains an enormous amount of small files stored in /usr/portage. You can format that mount point's partition with a file system that is more efficient at storing small files. Of course, this recommendation was made before SSDs were available or affordable.
On the other hand, f2fs file system is supposed to be more efficient for flash-based storage (minimizes writes), but not every boot code supports f2fs, so you may have to use ext4 for /boot and f2fs for the rest.
/tmp is supposed to be volatile. You cannot expect any file stored there to survive a reboot. Some distributions will deliberately wipe it out on startup. Some security auditing scripts (CSF, some profiles in RHEL/CentOS7's OpenSCAP, etc.) would recommend mounting a ramdisk there, again for compartmentalizing, but there is also next to no slowdown for "wiping" that directory.
Of course, most of the above would not apply to you. These are some of the examples that I have encountered that either requires using or improves if using different mount points. Personally, I have not been following the different mount points strategy, instead opting for whatever the distribution decides (which is usually a separate /boot and a separate /home, if space allows), although I may take extra security precautions if I am setting up an Internet-facing server.
TL;DR: Personal preference. Some are for legacy reasons. Some for technical reasons. Some were suggested long ago, but do not apply now. Take extra precaution if you are setting up a Linux-based server that has direct access to the Internet.
I use Linux as my daily driver and only boot Windows if I want to play some games. Although I wholeheartedly welcome your decision to switch to Linux, I have some doubts when reading your post, but lets start at the beginning.
Ubuntu is a solid choice, however I hear more and more people recommending Linux Mint and I guess it would be worth a shot to have a look at it before you decide to go with Ubuntu. Driver support is independent from your distro.
You'll probably want to switch your distro as soon as you've grown with Linux tough to get rid of the last bit of limitations.
VirtualBox can do this with just one command. However, this will fuck with your Windows Activation because the hardware changed.
Just to put this first: native gaming sucks balls. I own a fairly capable PC and am not afraid to tinker with driver and kernel modules at all but I couldn't even get close when it comes to FPS in most games. Besides the games from Valve almost all games advertised to "run under Linux" aren't optimized for OpenGL at all.
The best way to game would be a Windows VM or dual boot system. If you want to use a VM you would've to pass trough your GPU, this works fairly well in my experience but can be a bit of a hassle.
Now the software part: Try to use as many native-to-Linux programs as you can, but to some there will never be an alternative. If you do anything with Adobe stuff or Visual Studio there is no chance to find an alternative. You would have to run all of this in a VM. Yeah, you can get some of it to run using Wine and custom bindings, but you'll need to be an expert to do so, this is no task for a beginner. (I spent a whole day to get IDA Pro running...)
So, conclusion time: The way you described it it seems to me like you'll have to run Windows in a VM. Not just occasionally but most of the time. This will work but there is a good chance this won't make you happy because it's not a very natural workflow. So my final advise would be: Set up dual boot, try to use Linux as much as possible and if you find yourself gravitating back to Windows as much as I think you will reevaluate the whole thing.
Getting angry at people for not experiencing a problem you're having? I haven't had a spike at all since I started watching the stream. I even started monitoring my speaker levels to try and see what you have been getting and im just not.
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