except that for a majority of users, windows is where their applications are at - such as gaming, word processing, or some other thing. Sure there are replacements (somewhat) for each of those categories, but they are not direct replacements, and require a cost of some kind (retraining, or a substitute quality). This is esp. true for gaming, and it's only recent that gaming has made some inroads via the steam deck (steamOS), which isn't available to a general PC (only handheld PCs with AMD processors iirc).
People who say "just switch" to linux hasn't done it for their family/friends.
Most of its secret sauce is either in Proton or upstreamed into Wine, DXVK, SDL, etc. All available to a general PC.
Unless your focus is competitive online games, which often come with Windows-only anti-cheats, you've got a huge catalogue of great games playable on Linux distros. I did the switch about four months ago and I'm not missing Windows, the only pain point has been Nvidia drivers and I'll be solving that by switching vendors.
Until you switch to linux you won't understand how inferior your windows setup always was.
It's hard for us to tell you what you are missing out on, you simply need to experience it.
I mostly game in a Windows 10 VM running on my Linux desktop computer. Single keypress to switch to Linux workspace.
This is not because Linux gaming is horrible broken, but rather it gives me a fully separate leisure desktop, and my main Linux desktop is work only.
It also gives me 100% compatibility, unlike wine.
> People who say "just switch" to linux hasn't done it for their family/friends.
When we say so here, we are telling you to switch.
Nobody should be forcing anything on friends/family.
I always suggest MacOS for friends/family for ease of support. I would never recommend Windows to anyone.
Web has become the default platform, where most people run most of their app/spend most of their time. Even Microsoft has had no choice but to embrace it, and Outlook (as in, the one from Microsoft office) is now a web first app (normal outlook is rebranded "classic" and we all know where this is heading, for better or worse). In a way, that makes switching OS much easier.
If you add to that that Windows itself is getting major visual overhauls from version to version (sometimes even within) it's not like sticking with it protects you from having to learn different UX paradigms and habits.
And regarding gaming, well, linux with Proton runs games faster than Windows nowadays, that's how little Microsoft cares about gamers/how good Valve is (depending on how you look at it), but the fact of the matter remains.
So yeah, maybe this is the year of Linux. After decades on this planet :p
The majority of users either use only web applications, or web applications and Microsoft Office.
The true majority of users are on mobile.
Windows is only unreplaceable for gamers. Which is fine, because Windows is a toy anyway.
Doesn't even exist anymore. She's "365 Copilot" and web-first now.
Apologies for hopping on this thread with off topic question, but would you mind describing your setup?
I haven’t tried this in years, but last time I did I had trouble getting pass-through to some of my hardware, in particular my nvidia card.
Agree with your approach 100%!
> This is not because Linux gaming is horrible broken, but rather it gives me a fully separate leisure desktop, and my main Linux desktop is work only.
> It also gives me 100% compatibility, unlike wine.
You would get a fully separate leisure desktop if you were running Linux in that VM so it sounds like you are running Windows in the VM because Linux gaming is not adequate.
And quite a few musicians. When they make my software for Linux - and, it works ootb - I/ we'll be willing to change.
If you want to have GPU accelerated video output from a guest vm to a linux host, the only way is with a Windows guest (to the best of my knowledge). If you just need compute then that is different.