This thing has trouble running anything made past like 2012 and the newer emulators out there totally bust it. I tried recently running citra and it could barely hit 30%. Would switching over to linux lighten the load on the cpu and free it up so I could run more demanding games?
Also how is linux for emulation and gaming in general?
No. Linux doesn't make your CPU go faster.
The main thing where Linux helps on old hardware is that you can run it on less RAM, meaning you have more RAM for applications. And running out of RAM is very bad and slows everything down massively. If low memory is not your problem, it won't be faster, or at least not significantly.
The Linux GPU drivers for AMD and Intel are completely different from the Windows ones, and that can in theory make some difference (not necessarily for the better), but not a massive one unless there's something fucked going on.
There's a bunch of other specific or minor stuff, for example file operations can be faster on Linux, but you'd only notice that if you're doing some specific workload involving lots of small files, like switching branches on git or something like that.
Pretty much this, I dual boot Windows + Fedora and game on both, it is interesting that a good portion of my games, maybe 30-40%, especially those with Linux binaries, will actually run a lot better on Linux.
I think that may be down to GPU stuff, I suspect it's related to graphics drivers and Vulkan games probably.
Thanks for the info, it's as I feared then.