I recently got a used gaming laptop for the rare times I’m away from home for a while (next time likely for christmas) so the plan is to put linux on that from the start and see how it goes. And maybe getting diagnosed for adhd and getting on medication will mean I actually have the motivation to switch from windows before it becomes absolutely necessary, though thankfully I don’t get any start menu ads since I got rid of those with WinAeroTweaker, so I’m mostly happy with it.

Though I’ve been having some weird crashing issues that look like broken ram but aren’t, so if I end up replacing my mainboard from that (because at this point idk what else it would be) I’d likely have to reinstall windows anyway, and at that point I’d just switch.

I didn’t mind 7, some things I even thought were great compared to XP (like the search).

I can tolerate 10 well enough still given the de facto convenience of running windows for gaming, but the moment end of service comes around next year I’m switching to linux. I also have to use win 11 at work and it’s just infuriating how much worse it is. And conveniently Linux gaming got pretty good in the meantime, and I’ve been told I can now even set up a windows VM with GPU passthrough that activates when I start the VM for the cases where Linux just won’t work (though idk if that’ll work when the issue is anticheat, but I don’t play anything where that’s relevant anyway).

This was my experience just setting it up as dualboot and not doing super much with it. Sure I failed installing it a few times but I came out with more understanding of file systems, and in the end the wiki told me everything I needed to know.