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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

Dual boot and give it a shot.

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...

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.

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.