Linux

Just to clarify, you don't need to shrink your storage drive for any VM. I haven't used Windows for so many years, that I can't remember can you shrink your C:/ partition, so search for it from your preferred search engine.

For a Linux Newbie Nvidia should not cause problems. Pop_OS! releases their own .iso for their own made Nvidia drivers. Also other Nvidia driver named NVK should be available soon for any distro out of the box and it will remove most (if not all) Nvidia-related problems on Linux. But I bet most Linux-gamers uses Nvidia without issues anyway.

When you're about to do your first dual booting attempt, I highly recommend to take a backup from your Windows install since it's your first time so something unexplainable can go wrong.

Ps. Remember this until the rest of your life: no matter how you do it, Windows will always override and format your Linux ESP partition, so you have to always install Windows first and Linux second and preferably with its own ESP.

When you (and everyone else here) say shrink the partition from inside windows, do you mean from within the disk management software?

Yes, indeed! The Linux installer will also offer to do this resizing, but the file system drivers in Linux are mostly painfully reverse engineered stuff, whereas Microsoft can actually write stable code. So it's better to go to disk management and do the resizing there, so you don't accidentally corrupt times

Nvidia stuff

Nvidia stuff can work fine, but you'll have to read up on it after installing Linux. For almost all hardware, you install a distro and all drivers are installed. On Windows, drivers are installed during first boot. On Linux, proprietary drivers, like Nvidia's, need to be installed manually. How this is done, depends on the distro.

Pop_OS will install these drivers quite easily during install time. Ubuntu has a button in their software settings ("additional hardware") where you can click one single box and the driver should work after a reboot. On other distros, you'll need to check the distro specific instructions on how to install drivers.

I would not recommend following Nvidia's guides, which will have a very Windows style howto involving downloading an installer, something thst very rarely happens on Linux. I would also avoid guides/Ask Ubuntu answers that have you insert random lines into config files. Depending on the distro, some terminal work may be required, but many "fixes" seem to involve adding configuration files and settings that haven't been relevant for years because everyone copy/pastes old advice, and that can cause issues down the line. Generally, I think it's probably best to try to stick close do official distro manuals as possible.

One other thing: you may have encountered angry discussions about X11 and Wayland here. The details probably aren't very important for you, but your best bet is probably to use X11. That's not the default for many distros, but luckily switching back is easy (just click a drop down on the login screen and select X11). Wayland does work on your hardware, but Nvidia's mediocre software isn't very good at supporting modern protocols such as Wayland, so crashes and freezes are more common than you would expect/hope.

These days even Nvidia laptops work fine on many distros, something that was almost impossible ten years ago. There are some challenges (mostly involving power management and Wayland) but games work fine as far as Linux gaming is involved.