windowscentral[.]com/microsoft/windows-11/dual-booting-windows-linux-total-harmony-2025
Linux may, or may not be the future -- it depends on a bunch of things, like Windows 12 and the future prices of PCs and laptops. The linked article reflects the personal experience and views of an average PC user who prefers Windows after using both for a year. It's a bit of a counterpoint to the more pro Linux stuff I've posted. My opinion is that when you're used to using Windows, switching to Linux means learning the quirks of a new OS, figuring out how stuff works, and doing a fair amount of Googling to find out "how do I do that?". It's easier to just stick with Windows, but a lot of folks may be hard pressed to do that.
Win11 runs on most older hardware just fine -- today. That may change. Microsoft has been slowly but surely increasing Windows 11's demands on PC/laptop hardware. And then there's the next version of Windows, which is in the works. They've stated that Win12 will focus on agentic AI. They've also recently said that they want to rewrite Windows code using AI, replacing the current C & C++ programing language with Rust. They've shown that their primary concern is their stock price, not users [customers], while constantly worrying that Microsoft is widely considered way behind the leaders in AI. There's no telling what hardware will actually be required for Win12. And since legacy Windows code is responsible for a LOT of older hardware still working in Win11, there's a question of what hardware will still work after the rewrite. Don't forget, if they can't produce a monthly patch that isn't buggy, imagine the bugs an AI rewrite will introduce. Windows 12 may even be considered unusable on anything older than this year's Copilot+ laptops.
Buying new [or newer] hardware may be out of reach too. Blame AI. The rush to build AI data centers has the companies making RAM struggling to meet demand. Micron closed their consumer division to focus on making RAM for AI. Other companies are severely cutting production of PC/laptop RAM to focus on AI, causing a worldwide shortage that has Nvidia cutting production of their graphics cards, because they can't get the RAM for them. And that scarcity is already reflected by increasing PC/laptop prices, which will only climb higher as existing RAM inventories are depleted.
That said, things may return to something closer to normal. Cleaning some of the decades old garbage out of Windows codebase may in fact reduce Windows hardware demands. What may be an AI bubble could pop -- there are plenty of knowledgeable folks saying that the data center financing is a house of cards. Another tidbit -- the open weight AI models out of China are just slightly behind the so-called frontier models in the US, are cheaper to run, and are expected to be adopted by the majority of countries. OpenAI etc. may figure out that if they're limited to the US market, it doesn't make economic sense to keep building more data centers.
Long story short, rather than saying the sky is falling, abandon everything Windows, I think it's worthwhile to acknowledge Linux as an alternative, and maybe get used to the idea that you might want to switch some day. After all, most people have already been using it for years on their phones [both iOS & Android are based on Linux].
