And then the game wouldn’t work.

It doesn’t have to be open source. There’s plenty of binary firmware and drivers around.

Well you’ll hate to hear who contributes most to the linux kernel in that case…

If it’s for work, I’d suggest using whatever works for you best. Sounds incredibly frustrating so I don’t know why’d you be so set on ditching windows. Use the tools that work for you. Having said that, I’ve been running Linux since early 0.99 kernels and Debian since 1.3 and stability is really unmatched these days.

Your screen flicker issues with browser sound like hardware acceleration related bugs and I’d hazard a quess that random freezes and reboots have something to do with graphics drivers as well. But of course it’s impossible to tell without logs, which you didn’t provide.