should I completely jumpship to linux when windows 10 ends support/am ready or dualboot ltsc and linux

Jump the ship, I did 6 years ago, before even proton was a thing when games worked witha lot of thinkering.

Nowdays you habe so many great games working you won't mind a couple of games not working because of all the other playable games.

should I completely jumpship to linux when windows 10 ends support

Nah, there's no need to wait.

Why wait? Start using Linux friendly software in your day to day workflows. Then start to dual boot Linux with your current system and start using it more and more. By the time windows 10 reaches EOL you will know if you still need a Windows install or not.

When I left for Linux I had to give up League of Legends. I sucked it up, & after a month, I was fine without it & it was better since I knew it wouldn’t be worth the effort even trying to install it on Linux.

I’ve been a dual / triple / god knows how many OS booted since the 90’s.

Windows has gotten into bad habits lately - it’s not staying in its lane. Meaning it hasn’t respected other boot partitions for a long time, and recently there seems to be a lot of people having problems with windows nuking their linux installs.

My strong recommendation is to buy a second hard drive if you dual boot. Then windows can be “over there” - I’ve never had a problem dedicating ssds to the OS. My second recommendation is to do this now, why wait until you’re forced into something? You’ve got a year to learn Linux and get comfortable with it.

The longer you wait, the more distros we'll have to argue about when you ask for suggestions

Why wait? Dual boot, get cozy, still have the ability to go back to Windows if needed, find alternative apps, and soon enough, you won't need the Windows partition :) Worked for my partner, my brother, and myself

I switched a year or so ago and never looked back. there will be issues you need to overcome though. so better start with dualboot before windows 10 is eol

Dualboot definitely, don't belive anything other than that, taking slow the only good way

You should set up dual boot now so you don’t get surprised by differences when support ends and you feel the need to switch to an ltsc sku or use Linux.

Don’t wait, prepare!

Keep a hold of windows for a little while so that if something critical comes up that you can’t figure out you have a fallback.

I jumped ship a month ago. Never really used Linux outside of some small school projects.

And my god have I had lots of issues with stuff that didn't work or it was missing some packages that I had no idea how to get.

I have a colleague that have used Linux for +10-20 years. So having somebody to ask for help is very valuable!

But all the games I normally play is working so I don't regret jumping ship.

Start using it now in a VM. Linux has gotten very user friendly over the years but it's still a completely different system with different design philosophies. Ease into it now and test the water with different distros

I would almost recommend GPU passthrough if you have a dual GPU system and can figure it out. It definitely takes a bit of tinkering, but I like the results: I now have both a Windows 10 (maybe will become 11, maybe 11 LTSC) and a Hackintosh VM. It's not as good if you only have one graphics card, through. If you're up for it, I used this tutorial. If it's an AMD card, though, make sure to check my issue for any steps relating to that.

As for dual boot, get a second drive if you can. I find it helps me avoid a lot of the misery, although I very rarely actually boot up Windows anymore - just a VM if I really have to (which I do for MATLAB because my university is ridiculous and I figure if I'm going to use an evil programming language, I might as well use it in an isolated, evil environment).

Every sane person will recommend Linux only. However not everyone can use it. WMs decrease performance so you'll need good hardware. Dualboot may delete one of your OSes. It's a matter of if it's worth it or not. I personally don't see a problem with running Windows only for gaming. Though if you're paranoid about privacy then it may not be a good idea if your Linux partition is not encrypted (if there are backdoors, someone can mount your Linux partition remotely and read it etc etc). If you still want to keep Windows, buy a second physical drive to avoid the OS deletion risk.

If you switch to single boot Linux you can always install Windows in a virtual machine later in a pinch.

Something I did that helped make the jump was buying a separate drive to put linux on and removing my windows drive. It makes the act of switching back to windows take more effort, but didn't remove the possibility altogether.

I also got an enclosure for my M.2 and can use the windows drive as a super fast thumb drive and use that to transfer the files from the windows drive that I care to keep on linux. (none of it is critical, not worth doing proper back ups)

Jump ship. Just know, windows will pull you back in, especially if you work in corporate/office work. I was doing my work from home on Linux for two years straight, then my work mandated windows 11 for everyone. It’s been a nightmare. I just want my xfce!

You can always consider the experience of using Linux as a "game" itself and DU ET NAO!

...no really. Do it.

Why wait? There's no need for Windows, unless you're running some super-specialized app. The new versions of Windows already have telemetry and privacy issues, so why just go with minimal security options that MS is selling you? You can do almost everything in Linux just as well, if not better, than Windows does at this point. Start with Linux Mint, which is the most Windows-y distribution and you should be golden.

Doesn't hurt to try. I weened myself off Windows by using linux every single day and fiddling around for a few hours. Eventually it just clicked and i very rarely boot up Windows nowadays for apps that will not run on linux. Good luck!

My experience : jump ships. Dual-boot is unpractical. I dual-booted my PC at first, but that makes you remain on what's comfortable, and that's windows. Swallow the hard pill and leave windows behind. If you're already working mostly with OSS software (surf with Firefox, use LibreOffice, etc) than it's not that hard.

As long as you have your windows license key you can change your mind later so really you can do whatever. I'd recommend giving 100% linux a try if that seems fun. Obviously you're gonna want to back up any interesting files that you have on windows either way.

Better just start dual booting. If you begin to use Windows less and less, you can throw away that Windows partition and expand your Linux partition.

All advice here seems to focus on linux, but I'd say rip that bandaid off first. Go cold turkey on roblox. That shit is the worst cancer to come out of something that was fun initially.

Not in four months to a year. Yesterday. Learn to control your impulses first and the rest will fall into place, whichever way you go.

I tried dual-booting Win10 and Arch for a few months. It was problematic.

I had to set the clock every time I switched because one expected the hardware clock to use UTC time and the other expected local time.

NTFS on Linux is not good. The driver works, but there are fundamental differences between NTFS and Unix-like filesystems that makes cooperation difficult (e.g. NTFS uses ACLs instead of the user/group ownership and user/group/others permissions of Unix). Windows also places additional restrictions on the filesystem (e.g. NTFS supports file names that contain :, Windows doesn't) that can completely bork the volume if violated.

But the worst offender, and what made me nuke Windows entirely, is Windows Update. It completely fucked up the boot partition, deleted the bootloader, then died and left Windows unusable.

These are all issues that can be solved, if you know how to solve them. My advice is to go cold turkey and delete Windows from your life.

Doo Eeeet, Doo EEeet Now!!!

Seriously though, I vote VM under linux. Spin it up for whatever you need, use it less and less, no regrets...

No better way to learn and get used to it than ripping off the bandage and being forced to deal with it. That's what I did. Been Windows-free for ten years. If you still have a Windows partition around, it may be too tempting to just go back to it when things get a bit hairy.

As far as games, yeah, it sucks that I can't play some games, but I've filled that time with more productive hobbies. I can program C and C++ now, self taught on Linux.

But the more people that jump ship, the more developers will target Linux, so it's just a matter of time now before you can play anything again. It's definitely a 1000x better environment now than when I switched back then.

If you need Windows for some applications (e.g. Fusion, Call of Duty, etc.), dual boot it , but only the LTSC versions of it. Here are the links for the LTSC versions of Windows. I know that they're not from the official source, but I checked them and the checksums match. Otherwise, use Linux.

You'll never be wrong by making it dual boot - if you won't need Windows, hooray, but if you will - it's still there, always has been.

Depends on your needs. If you use any proprietary production tools like Photoshop, you may still need to keep Windows on the side. As for myself, unless the user really gets used to Linux, gains some experience, I do not advise to switch to Linux fully. I've seen so many people who did this and returned back to Windows.

If you have a laptop and a desktop put it on the laptop fully rather than dual boot

Until proton came out I kept dual booting but I always ended up booting into windows because I didn't know how to do x on Linux

When I just wiped windows completely and put it on my laptop I distro hopped for a bit but never went back

Ended up switching my PC over too after about 6 months and I no longer own any windows machines, nor feel the need to besides the odd firmware upgrade of a peripheral or something

Eh, you've already dual booted and "used linux more and more," unless you can think of a reason why you'd really need windows, and since you're already comfortable with linux, you might as well switch fully if you think you're ready.

I jump shipped to arch when I first started out. But I had experience with Linux vms for school already

Jump ship with us all! 😁 At this point, the very few games that I am leaving behind are only the ones that use anticheat systems that do not work with linux, and I don't think I'll really miss letting a game company rootkit my macine...

I would go the VM route first, and if you run into any troubles then you still always have the option of installing a 2nd hard drive for bare-metal windows dual boot later. If you do need to dual boot, I don't recommend partitioning one hard drive. Windows isn't good at sharing.

If you're new to linux and unsure about what distribution to install, there are plenty of better sources online with distro recommendations. I tend to use Debian on server/headless and Fedora for desktop/laptop. But I will say, picking an option with the KDE/Plasma desktop environment will probably be the easiest transition. It should feel and look pretty familiar to what you are used to with Windows and many distros offer an installation for KDE/Plasma.

My recommendation would be dual-boot until you get everything you need working and have had everything working for a month or two under Linux. Then do a full image backup of the Windows partitions with the Windows backup utility and keep it around just in case. After that spin-up a Windows VM for any edge cases you might come across and enjoy Linux.

Using Rufus (https://rufus.ie/en/) and a fast USB thumbdrive, such as Kingston DataTraveler Max - https://www.storagereview.com/review/kingston-datatraveler-max-review, you can make a "Windows To Go" installation.

Now you have a Windows install that you can boot directly from the thumbdrive when the need arise.
Perfect for booting up if your bios can't updated directly from the usb drive and forces you into Windows, or to run that one software you can't replace just yet and that refuses your attempts to run with wine.

Just make sure that it's an ssd usb thumbdrive or it's gonna be too slow to be any use.

I left windows years ago. I only need it for a couple really restrictive apps, so I dual boot, but I only boot in every few months.

I stopped playing games that use aggressive anticheat as well. 99% of the games I was playing work great, all I lost really was Fortnite and destiny 2, which is worth my sanity dealing with Windows nonsense.

I e been telling people who switch to; think of it like moving house. When you move to a new house, the bathroom isn't in the same place and the kitchen is different, it's up to you whether the new location is better or not. If you expect your new house to have all the same rooms in all the same places as your old house you'll always be disappointed the whole time. Linux is a different house, pick a house that suits your needs and you'll be happy.

Throwing out another idea: I upgraded an aging laptop and put mint on it and it's my main right now, but I can get on the newer windows computer if I need to. I rarely need to now, though things will come up and its nice to have an out. Recently it was getting my printer working which I so rarely use. Didn't have the patience, just needed the doc printed, flipped to windows.

It's a little sad to me. I watched windows rise to its peak with windows 2000 and slowly fall. Been using it since 3.1, and had dos-only for a little while before that. It's time to say goodbye. Been on and off with Linux since the early 2000s but this is my first real big push to use it outside of work or projects. Linux has come a long way from those days.

1. LTSC + WSL (Better than VM)
2. Dual Boot
3. Linux only

I chose the dual boot option when I decided to switch a year ago, and I found myself rarely using Windows eventhough it is installed on my laptop. I might have only boot it up 3-4 times since the switch, for GFN not working properly with ALT when running through browser. The dual boot just make my disk partition needlessly complicated, and I'm going to reinstall it yet again, without Windows.

I wish I could switch to Linux but sadly I can't (one of the main things I use a computer for won't work on Linux) so I'll be using windows 10 beyond eol and forever into the foreseeable future and I don't see native instruments making a Linux version any time soon. I email them at least once a year asking about it in the hope they one day fucking do it!

Jump ship. If you can make do without windows, do so. It takes away so much of the frustration, and you just learn to let it go when devs won't make linux-compatible binaries: after all, it's basically them telling you they need to be able to spy on you, so why use their app?

I'd say dual boot. Jumping ship from windows to linux without it is very hard, especially if you enjoy playing a windows-only game or rely on windows-only software. A virtual machine can work for some basic software, but you need to do GPU passt trough to the VM to be able to game at all, which is a... let's just say not insignificant amount of messing around and configuring stuff.

Dual boot and give it a shot.

The way I'm handling it is I currently dual boot with 2 separate hard drives. Linux is primary boot. there is no bootloader, I used the bios boot selector to load windows. Windows typically fucks up boot loaders or shared partitions so I have neither. I hope to have found a good distro that does everything I need by the time windows dies,

Windows is dropping support for dual boot?

dual boot, you never know when will you be forced to use windows again

• and for those who suggest VM, there are situations where its a hassle to make thing work or its impossible all together ( updating bios is one of those )