tomshardware[.]com/news/live/my-week-with-linux
Linux has its advantages, chief among them that it's more efficient than Windows, along with its disadvantages, mainly that Windows has MUCH better software & hardware support. And Linux can be overwhelmingly confusing, not so much because it's hard, but because you have what seems like an endless number of choices, plus there are different ways of doing things, rather than the single choices dictated by Microsoft. So what's it like making the jump? That's what Avram Piltch at Tom's Hardware wanted to find out, documenting what an average Windows user might encounter switching 100% to Linux. It's a good read.
One thing Avram does not talk about is performance, which can matter a Lot to those on lower powered PCs & laptops, with most writers who talk about Linux claiming it offers a significant boost on lower end hardware. *To me* that's the biggest incentive to switch. I tend to be OS agnostic -- the operating system is a necessary evil to run the main point of it all, your software. So when it comes to the death of Win10, *to me* the logical choice is to run Win11, whether your PC/laptop meets the fake hardware requirements or not. Linux is a viable alternative, but there's no way switching to Linux is as quick & easy as upgrading to Win11, so IMHO folks need a reason beyond Microsoft saying so. That said, aside from cramming AI into Windows in every way possible, there's no crystal ball revealing what Microsoft's going to do in the next year or three, so at some point in the future Linux *may* turn into a necessity.
Moving on to Avram's article itself, I 1st want to mention that the sites for many [most?] distros [versions] have a Live image [ISO] available that once transferred to a USB stick/drive [Rufus] allows you to run that Linux distro without installing anything, and they recommend using it. That might have saved Avram from a 2nd installation. Do note however that not all Linux distros support Secure Boot, so limit the choice to those if it's enabled [it usually is] to save you a little work.
One of the common Linux problems Avram ran into is relatively poor hardware support. For the basics, the keyboard and mouse, I wanted to note that many of these devices have onboard memory that stores how they're configured. Having/using a mouse &/or keyboard with that onboard storage *may* at least partly make up for the lack of factory-supplied software.
And Avram didn't get into VMs [Virtual Machines]. [Here gergn is better versed than I, since I've never run a VM in Linux.] If you have no alternative but to run Windows software in Linux you *might* be able to use Wine [a Windows compatibility layer] or you can use a VM. The 2 biggest limitations are 1) you're running an OS [Windows] inside another OS [Linux] so you're using up some of your hardware resources before you even do anything. And 2) you will not get the same sort of hardware level access to the GPU that you have in the host OS, so software that optionally uses the GPU can't. How viable a VM is as a solution depends then on both the specs of your PC/laptop, i.e., if you have enough hardware resources to spare, and the software itself, e.g., AI stuff is probably out.
