Microsoft already lost enterprise servers to Linux, and has lost significant ground over the years in consumer PCs to ChromeOS, MacOS, and Linux. Hell, the top PC gaming handheld is a Linux offering. That was an unheard of idea just five years ago.

While I agree that business laptops will continue to be dominated by Windows for awhile, the market shifts we see everywhere have downstream effects on business laptops too. When you find yourself having to train more and more people on how to use Windows than you did in the past, the value argument for Windows on your employee's laptops quickly comes into question.

You certainly won't be told what 'core telemetry' is required at any point in time.

Except the Diagnostics Data Viewer has been a thing for a long time and tells you exactly what data is sent back as telemetry. Now if you don't believe it that another topic.

at least I haven't seen anyone prove it sends all data of your machine

Hm, yeah that is definitely a weird thing to do, I'm using nobara (fedora) and it has the app center for snap and flatpost for flatpaks plus dnf for the package manager.

Fair enough. Personally my hardware isn't that new; the GPU is 3-4 years old at this point, the rest of the PC is ~5 years old so you would think even the latest LTS which is only a year or two old would support it. shrug

But yeah I'm liking nobara's rapid update cycle so far, though I haven't tried to change GPU drivers with it yet, so I suppose I will reserve a tiny amount of judgement until I have to do that.

I haven't used Windows at work in years for anything, not for cloud hosting, not for on-prem, not for employee machines etc etc. until the cost-cutters came in and forced Teams and other Microsoft crap to squeeze the market during inflation. The company is just waiting to be killed off now.

Rufus is great and I still keep a copy around, but I haven't gone back since I found Ventoy. You just run Ventoy on your stick, and then drag and drop any and all bootable ISOs into it. When you boot it, you get a list of all the ISOs to work with.

The only caveat is that you absolutely have to eject the USB, or else Ventoy probably will corrupt. That's a small price to pay to have Arch, Mint, Fedora, NixOS, and Win11 all on one OS ISO toolkit drive, plus I always eject my drives as a rule of thumb. Then all I have to do is update them every couple months.

Install the IoT version, that comes without any of the bloat and works just fine. Not even the Microsoft store is bundled in.

I have to assume so since other versions that have been "activated" the same way do. Real big shout out to you-know-who, btw. They make Microsoft software viable at all.

What?! I'm still working on my spreadsheet comparing 7 and 8!

I have heard about the IoT version. I'd have to look more into it, but I doubt I'm going back now that I've learned so much about Linux. I can troubleshoot most of Arch without touching the docs or asking online now, so it really defeats the purpose of switching back.

I also enjoy putting in a little effort to get things working. That's the thing about Linux. Most people that daily drive it get a dopamine release from tinkering with it and fixing things, and I'm one of those people.

I know there has been a big "its for everyone" push these days, but its really not. So I'm glad the IoT version exists for those that want or need it.

I downvoted it.

For starters I've seen this exact post a few times over the past 3 months in this community.

Secondly, the comments go exactly the same in these threads:

1. "linux can do everything, no faults at all, windows sucks"
2. "but I use windows for x and y and linux can't do it"
3. "how dare you insult linux, you should not be doing x and y, just do it with this app (which is completely inferior)"

Next, windows does everything I want it to do, I disabled and uninstalled everything I didn't want easily through settings & group policy, and it hasn't bothered me since.

I'd actually argue enterprise is more likely for people to switch, there's a lot of Linux sysadmins out there, and there's a lot of Linux in enterprise environments, and of course especially servers.

Unless you have specific requirements for specific software that runs only on Windows, getting away from Microsoft can be a pretty tempting prospect. Even if there are people who fear change and the idea of change like the plague.

Sleep/hibernate has been a pretty big problem for a while. As for the gpu, have you checked out NixOS? There's ways to enforce your integrated card to handle everything and change states for certain apps to the discreet card.

It takes a bit to learn, but nixlang is pretty simple. I've heard it referred to as "JSON with functions". It also has the largest package repository of any OS and is atomic, so its hard as hell to break. You can even make separate, containerized dev environments with flakes.

Yeah Linux is great, no doubt. I've been using Xubuntu since forever, never really touched Arch, but fundamentally if you know your way around one system, you'll manage another.

Still, there are a bunch of applications that I must run under Windows, so it's good to have the no frills version available for that.

Yeah I should switch to Ventoy.

I mean, if whole EU countries can do it, so can you.

I dual booth Win11 and Fedora Desk 42. It feels gross starting windows but there are 2, TWO! Apps that don't have Linux version that I still need.

When Linux wizards figure out a way to use win apps without the intimidating complexity of installing Wine or virtualization, more people will switch.

I think at this point Android is the king of operating systems in terms of what the majority of consumer devices run. Perhaps the path forward is people plugging their phone into a dock and being presented with a more productive interface.

Where does one purchase a single license for windows 10 iot lts? Isn't that only for volume purchases by large enterprises?

intimidating complexity of installing Wine

I would give that a shot. The full guide is install 'wine' and 'winetricks' the same way you install any other software you use. Then in winetricks, select 'default prefix', then 'run arbitrary executable', and point it to your .exe installer. After that, you just open the program like any other program on your system.

You generally don't need to do more than that and might let you forgo ever dual booting again.