$30 to not have to deal with Windows 11 for another year feels like the deal of the century.
I love how they're like 'but you won't get new features!'. They may have still not figured out that nobody cares about 'new features' being stuffed into the OS, but I guess you can't have everything.
I just want all windows games to run on linux with equivalent performance and without anticheat hurdles. After that happens i'm done with windows.
Honestly, i'm really not that far off as-is. Steam Deck already runs most of my library, it's just the games that don't work with a controller that are a problem.
Linux will get multiplayer game support from those straggler game companies when people show the userbase is there. They will always follow the money. So if you stay with Windows the devs won't support Linux. So saying "I'll move to Linux once they support it", will ensure they will never support it.
My suggestion is to dual-boot for now and keep putting pressure on the game devs to support Linux. It's important to dual boot and run as many games on Linux as possible for now to show in the steam metrics that more people are leaving Windows.
I just want all windows games to run on linux with equivalent performance and without anticheat hurdles. After that happens i'm done with windows.
That's one strategy. Mine is to just say "fuck it" until the devs and studios make their games more playable on Linux. I can deal with not playing some games to make that happen. That's not for everyone though.
Switching to a better non-mainstream alternative to anything always brings some compatibility pains until enough are doing it to where the tide shifts. I accept this.
I would just use my desktop for that use case. There's still a small minority of games that just don't work via proton but it's really a minority.
I've also seen a handful of games with linux builds that just don't run properly because they update the game but don't do enough QA to the linux build or simply don't put resources towards linux issues to the same degree that windows gets.
I ran PopOS on linux for years, every game I had worked, and actually performed better than on Windows, once Proton got to version 7.
with the exception of games that run multiplayer kernel level anti cheat.
** oh and almost all of those games use anti cheats that are compatible with linux/proton, and have been for 3 years, but the game devs/management just refuse to enable that support, even though its already included in their contracts with AC providers for no extra cost.
But unfortunately, we only get "most" games running on Linux w/ similar if not equivalent performance. Unfortunately, game devs for some reason refuse to support Linux w/ their anti-cheat implementations (even if the anti-cheat solution works fine on Linux), so getting to 100% is going to take some time and a lot of people shifting to Linux despite not every game working perfectly. Most do though.
Consider that Microsoft will have supported Windows 10 for 10 years as of next year, I will say it had a good run. Considering the longest support cycle for an OS I can find that is even remotely usable as a daily is Slackware 14.1, at 9 years, and support ended for that almost a year ago.
Powertoys and fancyzones in particular has been amazing with the proliferation of large monitors. Saves so much time and effort to configure windows. Don't understand why it is an optional utility and not built into the OS.
Uhh, driver support and networking have vastly improved since Windows XP.
If you had ever done a clean reinstall of XP, you'd know what a pain it was to make sure you had your NIC drivers on a floppy or USB drive before you started.
For Microsoft, sure. If they capture all Windows 10 machines, they're in for a $21 billion payday. If they get half of them, $10 billion. A quarter, $5 billion. An eighth, $2.5 billion.
Your $30 in aggregate is only a deal for Microsoft. They'll ask for another $30 a year after that and now you've normalized paying for security updates.
No it doesn't. We have any number of free and open source operating systems to choose from that are already more secure. The number of people in a situation where they absolutely need to run Windows specifically is small.
Someone has to pay for that work. Either volunteers are donating their time, corporations "donate" work of their employees or hire it out because use of the project generates profits for them and they recognize not everyone can be a parasite (The FOSS model)
The other alternative is users paying directly.
If you want to use a closed source os, then pay for updates or you will be monetized on other ways. (In the case of MS that would be ads or the OS is just an incidental product used to drive sales of software or cloud computing)