In late stage 'can't afford' just means the client 'needs more ~~persuasion~~ pressure to redirect their income from silly things like food into our products'. Otherwise the perfect system collapses.
Holy shit just use Linux
Do equivalents for FL Studio, Photoshop, Sony Vegas, Blender, and still over half my Steam library run either natively under Linux, 100% functionally under WINE, or have 1:1 equivalencies in the FOSS space? "Just use Linux" is still not the silver bullet y'all think it is
Photoshop = Gimp and/or Krita
Sony Vegas = DaVinci Resolve, or maybe kdenlive
Blender = Blender
and still over half my Steam library run either natively under Linux, 100% functionally under WINE = Steam with Proton enabled*
* May require tinkering
See protondb.com if a game doesn't work out of the box (after enabling Proton).
The large part of the games I've played in my Steam library worked out of the box (e.g. Forza Horison 5, Hitman 2, FrostPunk, Hearts of Iron 4, War Thunder), others vary from "click windows 7 in launcher" (Workers and Resources), use Proton 7 instead of Proton Experimental (ChilloutVR), use beta feature in Steam to download an older version of the game (Beat Saber), to Black screen, doesn't work after tinkering (RDR2) or uses Anti-cheat that doesn't work on Linux (Pavlov). It seems that all those that I could get working were 100% functionally fine.
If you have the hardware for it and/or can deal with some sacrifice, you could use a Windows virtual machine in linux, and do a GPU passthrough for gaming.
Linux will not meet 100% of your needs until the software developers decide to support Linux. It takes a lot of time to learn Linux. This is true. Even as a Gentoo and Arch user, I still have a lot of difficulty and frustration with certain projects to make my system work as needed. However, one thing I have learned in my journey with Linux is that there's a lot of beauty in using simple and plaintext tools, as well as learning the base Linux system and extending it with its well established protocols and tools. Linux can serve as your IDE, your music production environment, etc., but this does require becoming a more advanced computer user and may even require some programming experience. However, I like getting into the nuts and bolts of my machines, and I recognize that not everyone has the passion/time/energy to do same.
I started off in my later childhood not understanding what a DVD drive was and why it mattered when installing the Sims game I wanted to play. It took a long time for me to understand computers as I do now. I made the full switch to Linux when I had to bring a desktop computer to the library to use their wifi and lost my progress on my resume and job applications because Windows forced its updates on me. At this point, Windows was too much of an impediment to getting my life in a better place that I had to switch. Linux gives me full control of my system, and honestly it's much more convenient to get work done than to deal with the ancient and broken OS that Windows is. I value open source tools, and have been able to find better replacements than the old proprietary tools I used in Windows. I want to be able to be free from all proprietary shackles one day and be self/collectively-sufficient as possible in order to survive this capitalist system until we have a socialist revolution.
I know in your situation, some tools like FL Studio and Sony Vegas do not have 100% FOSS equivalents in Linux yet, but perhaps, if financially viable, you could get an inexpensive laptop or a small mini pc that you could install those tools on, and then use Linux for your main work. I would suggest Linux Mint to experiment with, though I wish they still supported KDE as I believe that desktop environment is much better for people who were Windows users. It's still probably one of the best beginner Linux distros, but I wish there was a better option for people to migrate from Windows, and I don't believe there's one perfect Linux distro for absolute beginners.
gpu passthrough if you have 2 video cards and only want to use one of them in your vm
A single gpu passthrough is also possible now
oh my, i hadn't heard
real
Isk which apps work there
It may be a (likely made-up) hardware limitation, or it may be a feature only available in more expensive Windows licenses. That's ultimately what "trusted computing" comes down to. A computer will compute whatever Microsoft trusts it to, not what the person operating it wants.
wait a minute, windows being crap is INTENTIONAL?
Water is wet
What is the feature
Seems like TPM or core isolation. There are several hardware implementations to secure devices that 10yr old CPUs do not support. These are 'new' features, not a decision to break your security.
Windows Security
So what’s the actual context here?
I was trying to figure out what keeps leaking my data but I can't do so because muh unsupported hardware.
If you’re trying to access the memory integrity / core isolation features, those do rely on specific hardware functions that are only found in a new enough CPU.