The answer is yes and no.
The operating system itself will run smoother, easier, yes, and as a plus it will not take as much hard drive space (irrelevant). But the computer can only do what it is capable of, changing the operating system will not improve performance of applications unless they are slightly more optimized for that operating system. They still take the same amount of resources for the same tasks.
On the other hand, it will improve performance because windows runs a lot more background processes, and does many other things to slow itself down, and when the OS is not taking up as many resources as it would on windows, it will allocate more for your intensive usage. So, in theory, yes, Ubuntu will be faster and be able to run your applications more smoothly.
As a tip, if you want more speed out of it, it would be very smart to go with the XFCE version of ubuntu, it is a lighter version on the GUI side of things, so it's better for your case.
And no worries, we were all new at one point ! :) Cheers. Hope this helps clear it up a little bit.