I just run two drives - one with windows and one with Linux.

I treat the windows one as a console essentially, not even logged into my password manager or email or anything. It is only for games. Basically an Xbox, with all sorts of normal annoying UX, but it doesn’t matter for all of the ~2 minutes until I can launch a game

Separate linux drive for everything else.

I could tolerate Windows more if it stopped being a rental OS that thinks MS own your laptop more than you do. Like it was in Windows 7.

All I ask is that things I uninstall stay uninstalled -- I got rid of OneDrive and Teams for a reason, stop adding that shit back! -- and that it doesn't shove Edge and Bing down my throat and decide that MS knows better than I do about what I want.

Last time I checked, Linux didn't have hardware acceleration for videos in most browsers. I think it was 2 or 3 years ago, certainly way after "the late 00's".

In my opinion, an operating system that sucks the battery out of your laptop is not good enough.

Just one exemple but I think it's pretty straightforward.

For me last year was the tipping point, with Windows 10 hitting EOL I refused to move to the buggy mess of 11. All the games I regularly play are now nearly flawless in proton and games that refuse to run on Linux just don't exist for me anymore. Admittedly I already didn't play the kinds of highly competitive online games that like to use KLAC, so might be a tougher sell if that's your jam. Most of my game time goes to FF14 and GW2.

I assume this isn't the case with every machine, but every hardware I've ever owned (including the Framework 13, which has pretty good Linux support) has had worse battery life under Linux (mainstream distros like Fedora and Ubuntu).

To say nothing of the truly excellent battery life Macs these days get.

That's the only reason to avoid Linux on a laptop these days, IMO.

I switched from Windows to Linux because I got a Steam Deck, which caused me to realize that the only games in my library that don't also run flawlessly on Linux are the ones that have invasive anticheat that I'm really not comfortable installing.

Having to enable TPM or device integrity or whatever it is on my own computer just to run my own games is just too much power to hand to some garbage corporation that shits on its users. Rubbed me so far the wrong that way that I gave it up. The fact that Win 11 is no longer just an easy and hands-off solution that "just works" but is bloated with dark patterns and "AI" bullshit certainly helped cement the decision.

I repeat this story every now and then but I "maintain" a 18 years old laptop with Ubuntu (mainly for Internet) for non-tech savvy user. I put it in quotes because I just run apt update every now and then - that's it. Just works. The only bottleneck is how resource-hungry browsers got over time but it remains usable. Ubuntu was installed sometime back in 2017 and there was no need for fresh reinstall since then.

Anecdotally, my (smart but doesn't really care much about computers) fiancee was able to get all dozen of her mods for The Sims working on Bazzite Linux without any help from me besides a chmod +x to one script.

But we don't play any online multiplayer games, so YMMV on that one.

I usually don't care enough about the games that only run on Windows. Most of the games I play are 100% playable on Linux, even the online competitive ones. Never liked League, PUBG or GTA Online anyway

I tend to run pretty close to the edge on hardware (9950x, 9070xt, gen5 nvme)... I've had a few issues with that in Linux... that said, I've been using Linux as the main OS on my desktop for a while now, and when I upgraded about a year ago, I ditched the Windows drive entirely.

I do have a Windows Server 2025 and Win11 VM running for a couple testing issues, but that's about it. That said, there seems to be a few integration issues on Wayland where the RDP client or the VM UI both will not intercept hotkeys like alt-tab, which makes it kind of painful to use the VM effectively.

Even with the rough edges in Cosmic, I'll still take it over the jank they keep addding to Windows.

Linux is missing good vm defaults (dirty_bytes etc.) - out of the box settings on the distros I tried are abysmal; both windows and macos are much saner.

Other than that, yeah, it's a royal pain in the ass. It's treating the user primarily as an upsell funnel.

Its always been a momentum thing for me, grew up on Windows, esp in my LAN party days. The guys running linux couldn't play 90% of the games the rest of us were. When dev became more important to me I would typically reach for something else because the windows dev experience always kind of sucked IMO (unless you were a .NET person, which for the most part I was not).

I have a spare laptop with Pop OS on it now and I'm really enjoying it. Kind of forget I'm on it sometimes. I'm considering putting it as my OS for my main powerful laptop that I play most of my games on.

There is like 20 online games that don't work... No need to give it all up if you switch

I dual boot Windows and Pop OS. I find the Windows 10 LTSC experience totally perfect, and it has a longer EOL.

I don't seem to have issues modding games like Skyrim, Fallout 4 or Factorio on Linux

If you avoid games that demand kernel-level access, gaming on Linux works just fine.

Honestly, I don't trust game producers enough to grant then kernel access. Do you? Really?

Install the IoT LTSC edition. No crapware at all. It's a really solid OS. Less painful than Linux overall.

I run Windows 11 as my main desktop (and use Mac at work and have a bunch of servers / NAS where I run debian), and W11 is not painful at all.

I installed the Professional edition, disabled a few settings that I don't like the first time I installed it, and haven't had any issue or friction since then.

Meanwhile I'm constantly frustrated at MacOS and obviously you can't do anything on Linux without running into some sort of trouble.