A little over a year ago I dropped Windows in favor of Linux, and haven't looked back since. I have been nothing but genuinely surprised at how smooth the transition has been for me.

Ditching Windows certainly hasn't been without issues, see my previous post for more info, but overall it's been incredibly smooth. One day I was using Windows every day, and then the next I was not. After the first time I booted into a Linux installer from a flash drive I never booted back into Windows. Not once. I've never even had to consider it.

I am still running Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS, which is pretty old, but it's still supported so I don't mind. Currently I'm waiting for the folks at System76 to release a stable version of Pop!_OS with their Cosmic Desktop Environment before I do any sort of major upgrade. Historically I've never had good luck with Wayland, so I haven't had much of a desire to move to a Wayland forward environment. The Wayland experience for Nvidia systems is supposed to be a lot better with the introduction of explicit sync, but I don't have a lot of motivation to try it out, considering everything is just working for me at the moment. With Cosmic I see a reason to move to a new system, it genuinely looks great, and I am very excited for what System76 are doing.

With Windows 10 EOL arriving on October 14th, 2025, I see a lot more reason for folks to make the jump to Linux. While I don't think everyone can make the change the way I did, where you just dive right in and make it work, I certainly think a lot of people can. Moving to Linux is easier today than it was a decade ago, though there is still room for improvement. If you are even slightly interested in ditching Windows I would recommend giving it a try. IMO you should pick a popular, well supported, OS. I would recommend Pop!_OS for basically everyone, though Ubuntu is quite common.

The easiest way to make the transition is to buy a separate hard drive just for Linux. With a dedicated hard drive for Linux you won't need to make any changes to your existing Windows configuration, and should anything go terribly wrong you can easily boot back into Windows. If everything works smoothly, as it has in my case, you can easily wipe your old Windows drive, and celebrate the added storage space available to you. This technique is obviously a lot harder if you have a laptop, but anyone with a desktop should be able to use this technique with relative ease.

At this point I do not see myself ever going back to Windows. Microsoft has completely shit the bed and ruined Windows, with no signs that they'll ever fix it. Meanwhile, as portable PC gaming systems have become more popular, so has Linux. Right now folks buying systems such as the ROG Ally X are finding Windows 11 to be a horrible experience as a mobile platform, while operating systems such as Bazzite or SteamOS are proving to be much easier to use, and have advanced features such as the ability to suspend the system mid-game.