Is Ubuntu 16.04 bad?

if you are worried about 16.04 you can use the older 14.04 and upgrade when first "service pack" comes out for 16.04.

to get the GPU chip there should be a catalyst center that identifys it. system informaiton iwll also have informaiton about the chip. if oyu want tomsething more user firendly there is speccy.

the reason why chip might be important is that 16.04 dropped support of closed source drivers for some AMD chips. so they rely on opensource drivers which are still about 20-30% worse than closed source (depending on the chip). this matter if you intend to play games. however for desktop work the opensouce drivers are more than fine.

with win7 you will get a fre win 10 upgrade option. win10 is fatser than 7 (for now at least). and another thing - with win7 it is relatively easy to install Ubutnu side by side, so you can have both OS. i have one such setup.

in any case you can run a live session (in RAM) from USB/DVD before installing it, to try it out. be sure to also explore other flavours : Xubutnu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Mate and Kubuntu.