I was a huge Linux nerd in the early 2000s and tried my best to use it as a daily driver. But gaming forced me to keep a windows box around and eventually I got tired of the inconvenience of dual booting and Windows became primary for awhile.
More recently, I decided to try moving back to Linux as a primary desktop environment after getting frustrated and annoyed by the various dark patterns in Windows, and I was shocked to find how much better the gaming landscape looks now thanks to Steam and Proton. I’ve successfully gone all in on Linux again and hope to never use windows outside of an occasional virtual machine when I have no other choice.
Depending on your reasons for keeping windows around, it’s worth taking a look at the Linux desktop again. It’s exciting and gratifying to find it so extremely functional after many years of frustration and living on the bleeding edge of something that wasn’t ready for the mainstream at the time.
One of the reasons for me to use Windows (still) is Photoshop.
Besides actually playing the games, I use Photoshop to make skins for my cars when simracing.
There are several options online now, that implement almost all the features from Photoshop that I use.
I have used Photopea, and while it runs slower than native Photoshop, I am genuinely surprised about how good it is, and how feature complete it is. I recommend Photopea over Gimp ten times out of ten.
There are others like Pixlr I have yet to test, but now I am convinced graphic edition can be done without Photoshop.
I have a MacBook Air that I use for Lightroom/Photoshop so I’ve managed to avoid that issue when moving off of windows.
With that said, I’ve been experimenting with various RAW processing tools on Linux because I’d love to eventually move to Asahi. I do think this remains one of the weakest areas on Linux, but the tools keep getting better. Good to know about Photopea vs. Gimp. I definitely need to try this.
How is hardware acceleration and Widevine support right now? I use Windows 10 (IOT fwiw) largely because I use MS Office and want smooth videos on the browser.
There are Linux builds with widevine IIRC, but those aren't the "from source builds" from the distros. I also recently saw a video of someone running PowerPoint via Wine. Dunno what they did or if it was a plain Wine build, but it was running and it did do stuff.
Good enough that I haven’t had to think about it since switching back. With that said, I don’t have specific knowledge of any edge cases where that might be a problem.
I’m using an Nvidia RTX 3000 series with 1st party drivers and Firefox for my browser.
I really really want to get off of Windows because of the dark patterns. I'm even satisfied with the state of gaming on Linux based on my SteamDeck. So I've been test driving my SteamDeck as a portable PC when I travel. There are still a few things that give me pause when I think about eventually switching my primary PC to Linux:
1. Two apps: I use OneNote daily for work and personal notetaking, use the OneNote app on my iPhone, and have shared notebooks with several (non-technically minded) family members. There is no other free (or even paid) comparable software that does all of this. Sadly, the best you can do on Linux is use it through the clumsy web interface. And then, Autodesk Fusion360 for my dabbling in 3d printing, also without native Linux support.
2. Very basic things like mouse scroll wheel and mouse pointer acceleration are at best somewhat "off" or at worst impossible to tweak, depending on which which display protocol / linux flavor you're using. Every time I rathole on it, I end up at the same place: some spat between libinput and Wayland. I don't care about who does it, I just want it to work.
I could probably get by with a windows VM or other alternatives for the unsupported applications. So then it's a wash between Windows enshittification and Linux rough edges. I suppose within a few years as the enshittification continues worsening while the rough edges get fixed, it becomes an easier decision.
Regarding the apps, you might want to check out this project on GitHub [0]. I came across this while doing some research about Fusion 360 on Linux and while I haven’t tried it yet, it is well trafficked and looks promising. In general, Wine has matured a lot making more things like this possible.
Regarding OneNote, the P3X project is worth checking out [1].
Regarding cursor acceleration, I’ve stopped trying to use Wayland and generally find that X11 is pretty rock solid. Many distros now focus on aesthetic optimizations, and coupled with ChatGPT as a configuration assistant, I haven’t gotten stuck on issues like this.
Thanks for the tips. I did try the wine wrapper for Fusion 360 a while ago but ran into some known issue with the startup dialog not being able to open up the browser for Fusion360 (sigh, more unnecessary enshittification - I also tried FreeCAD but it wasn't easy to use).
> ...it's a wash between Windows enshittification and Linux rough edges.
I thought I would feel this way as well, but I came to the realization that, ultimately, my productivity is still better with Linux. And, well, I feel a little better knowing that I'm no longer subjected to Microsoft's monetarily-derived whims.
I have moved to Arch Linux 100% for work and personal use. I too have a Windows 10 machine for gaming -- but it runs LTSC, which is _much_ more super user friendly, less user hostile.
More recently, I decided to try moving back to Linux as a primary desktop environment after getting frustrated and annoyed by the various dark patterns in Windows, and I was shocked to find how much better the gaming landscape looks now thanks to Steam and Proton. I’ve successfully gone all in on Linux again and hope to never use windows outside of an occasional virtual machine when I have no other choice.
Depending on your reasons for keeping windows around, it’s worth taking a look at the Linux desktop again. It’s exciting and gratifying to find it so extremely functional after many years of frustration and living on the bleeding edge of something that wasn’t ready for the mainstream at the time.