I have terabytes of games, shit internet and no patience for things that don't just work immediately. I can only tolerated windows because I've already fixed it and I don't have to keep fixing it anymore.

Who knows what will happen with my next gaming laptop though, if it's fresh and empty I won't have that excuse, although there is always 'cbf' to fall back on.

I made the change about a year ago now. I saw the end of Windows 10 coming up and decided to install linux in a dual boot and try my best to use it exclusively for a couple months until I properly got used to it. You will need to accept that not every program you use on Windows will be available and you may have to try out a couple replacements before you find something that works for you. But most things have decent alternatives. Especially considering how much is done in a web browser these days, there aren't too many programs I really miss from Windows (mostly 3D CAD and RAW image processing).

Also, note that the differences between distros is way overblown when it comes to compatibility, it is mostly just a case of whether your package manager has the packages you want available and how bleeding edge the packages your distro uses are. Debian based distros (e.g. Ubuntu and Mint) tend to use slightly older packages than ones that are rolling release like Arch which should theoretically be a bit more stable.

There is too concentrated which is bad (mac, win), and there is too fragmented which is bad (that is your Linux/distro universe). In other words, in one world, a single entity controls and is responsible for everything, and in another world, no one is. I am not getting into what is worse or better, rather what is usable for an end user.

And then there's the tacit wisdom of the FOSS/Linux world savants: "Uh, if something is not done or not available – you can just fork it or raise a PR, can't you?" completely escaping the fact that almost the entirety of the users of either world are just end users.

I recently switched to Linux, but the reason it took so long was primarily:

1. Just getting the time to do it. I'm really busy these days and setting up a PC from scratch with all the stuff I need and how I want it to be takes a lot of time.
2. Concerns about gaming, which turned out to be a complete non-issue. I can game completely fine and easily on Linux via Steam's compatibility settings. I can even use it to install non-Steam games and launchers, like Battlenet.
3. Concerns about stuff not "just working" and I will say, there are more small annoyances. Already had a few segfaults from KDE Plasma when waking from sleep which crashes all programs and leaves me with an empty desktop. We really collectively need to move away from memory-unsafe languages, but yea you just don't get those sorts of bugs on Windows because Microsoft performs much, much more extensive testing of their code than Linux does (which is sad, but is the reality).

Engineering CADs and old peripherals with proprietary drivers for me. This cannot be always solved with a VM because either they are graphically intensive or hardware passthrough just doesn't work for them.

There's one specific case of Texas Instruments' software suite for microcontrollers: they have all the tools, the IDE and SDKs available for windows/mac/linux, EXCEPT one stupid old sdk I needed that was ONLY available on Windows for some reason, so I had to use it just for that stupid piece of drivers.

For games I either do games that work on proton, or for extreme cased I have a VM with second GPU in passthrough, and that works quite qell, but cannot do on a work laptop.

because i already did it

• I don't have a personal computer, just my work computer right now so I don't need it.
• I work in graphics so I'm wary that not everything I use now will be available (I know there are alternatives, but they aren't equal).
• I got a steam deck for my gaming (not my day to day).
• my wife and I use Mac's and iPhones and I'm worried it'll be hard for her to switch and the ecosystem is very convent and easy right now.
• I acquired a gaming computer for my kid and promptly put mint on it.
• I only pretend to be technologically savvy and am not confident to answer all the questions my family needs to go full Linux. It's more at the testing hobby level.

My main reasons boil down to availability of programs, no necessity yet, and ease of the new ecosystem isn't as simple.

Personal: Linux with a secondary, occasionaly used box for things that only seem to work on Windows. Would just do a VM if I didn't already have a spare hand-me-down box.

Work: I'm not fighting that battle. If they deploy Windows, I'm using Windows.

Going 100% Linux, even just in personal use, is still not feasible for someone who doesn't want to make it one of their primary hobbies.

For work our projects use .NET Framework so it needs to run on windows.

For personal use it's a combination of mostly Valorant, which refuses to run anywhere but windows... and short term productivity loss because it's simply the platform I know my way around.

For my homelab I naturally have Linux running though, and the second Valorant supports Linux (lol) I'm gone.

There is a critical work applications that I need. I’ve tried everything to get it to run on Linux, so I really can’t do it.

Bought a Mac instead to at least get away from windows. The day that app can run on Linux, I’ll be switching back to it.

I'm on Linux everywhere at home except for my lounge family PC. It runs windows and Linux, but boots in to windows by default. That way when my kid or friends/family are using it, it's familiar to them, but when I use it, I can boot it in to linux.

It's not even true dual booting. Rather, they're each installed on their own dedicated drives, and I jump in to the bios to boot from Linux when I need it. It means they don't really even have to coexist and break each other's installs

For my laptop, 90% of. The reason is pc game pass. I like trying random games out for a few hours.

That said, my old desktop is still on windows 10 and there's some shitty update that occasionally causes boot failure after which I've to either rollback the update, restore to a system restore point or (once) do a full windows reinstall.

The problem happened again a couple days ago. Since it's not my daily driver anymore, I just don't have to energy to fix it. I think it might be time to move to Linux, except I've no idea what distro to go for. For work, I've used a bunch of centos and rocky servers, but they've always been cli. I've no idea what kind of good ui based distros will work for me.

VR. Even my valve index, which is supposed to be the best supported on linux, has been nothing but hell on earth to try and get running. I remember reading about envision and if i can get that to work on arch, and the performance is acceptable, i might switch over to it sometime after windows reaches EOL.

Main reasons are:

• Work - I use my PC every day, all day, for work, so making OS level changes is something I'm not keen to do for fear of breaking something. I had meant to get a cheap laptop to practice Linux on, but time/money got in the way of that.
• Lack of knowledge - I'm far from a novice with computers, and am frequently the person people turn to for help, but I've never really used anything but Windows (Mac for a year, once, but only intermittently) and I know nothing about drive partitioning, etc.
• Software - I use Adobe products frequently, especially Photoshop and Première and while I know people say that there are alternatives, I don't feel like I have the energy to start learning again with new programs.
• Time - I just don't have the time to spend on all of the above.

All that said, I'm going to have to do something about it! Ugh.

Every office job ever runs on Windows & Office. Fact of life, cannot change it.

Maybe excluding the smallest businesses where the people are actually still human.

Adobe and games. But actually mostly Adobe.

My main workflow is on Linux, but I do have to keep a couple of Windows machines around. One laptop for work stuff (bought out of pocket, employer has BYOD policy, go figure) that needs or works more reliably on Windows. Then a repurposed e-waste laptop at home for the occasional Windows-only utility or proprietary interface software for various old gadgets. The latter forces me to have a physical Windows machine since getting bespoke hardware to pass through reliably to a Windows VM isn't a high ROI activity.