You’re most welcome. I completely understand your situation and is why I don’t constantly tell others to switch. I’m very happy using Linux, but I had to do a lot of learning to get here. I know it’s not realistic for everybody to have the motivation to make the move.
Keep in mind, SteamOS is going to be smooth for gaming, but possibly challenging for other things. Modding will still have some challenges to it and anything that isn’t gaming might not be so easy too. If you plan to use SteamOS when it comes out, the closest experience to it is Bazzite OS with KDE Plasma. If you’re curious enough, setup it up in a VM and try to get your non-gaming software working.
I don’t know if it’s more resource-efficient, but when I wanted to start using VMs for work, I knew VirtualBox would not be a viable choice (thanks to Oracle and their horrible licensing), so I chose GNOME Boxes and have been pretty happy with it. I didn’t do any tests so I can’t say for certain , but it doesn’t seem like the resource consumption is that much different.