Hi, I was stranded for a few years on a Raspberry Pi 3 (then 4) running Raspbian after Windows 7 went EOL.
From what I can say, it was "okay" most of time. Though it had bugs, too.
I often did the more ambitious things (picture editing etc) on an Mac Pro 2.1 running Windows XP (as main OS, it also had OS X SL 10.6.8 installed).

So I recommend to have a other PC or laptop at hand before trying to make a switch.
If you merely want to get rid of Windows, macOS is another option.
It requires a bit of re-learning, though. At the beginning, it may feel a bit alien.
After over a week or so, you adapt. You don't have to miss out on Windows, either.
Parallels Desktop is common on Mac systems. Windows 11 (and old Win10 releases) have an ARM port, too.

As for Linux, you have to find a matching Linux distro.
Way back in the 2010s, Ubuntu was quite popular. Now its Linux Mint, apparently.
If you like it more exotic, there are distributions such as Hot Dog Linux, Hannah Montana Linux or Nyarch Linux.

Last but not least, there's also BSD.. But it's more niche and not for beginners.

Mint is good at doing a Windows 10 style, for Windows 11 style, KDE Plasma (on a number of distros) plus a theme pack...

Benefit of Linux. Your system, Your Way, no need for TPM, no stuff added that you didn't ask for, no telemetry.
Drawbacks... Learning curve, the various Windows friendly ones do make things a bit easier, and with luck, you can manage things entirely from the GUI, and in some respects, maybe not that much worse than switching major Windows versions.
It's not Windows, SOME Windows stuff can be run using Wine, Steam games through Proton, but low level anti-cheat that to be honest, abuses Windows, cannot work in Linux

^any independence of Microsoft software (or US software in general) is good for sovereignty these days.
The aforementioned macOS also isn't immune here, but Apple is at least more protective over "their" stuff (users and products; except in China).
Also, malware/spyware for Windows is the most popular, maybe.
Having the option to surf the web with a different OS makes things safer.
I wouldn't entirely give up on Windows, though. Having it on another computer or in an VM is reasonable.
Because the library of Windows software is huge and knowing how to use Windows might be important.
On a dedicated PC/VM it can be isolated more easily.

Edit: About WINE.. There used to be Cedega and CrossOver Office, too.
The commercial Wine versions might be more optimized for games and Microsoft software.
But Virtualbox can run a real Windows in seamless mode, too on the Linux desktop.
When building a Linux PC, I would make sure that the RAM is overkill and that a swap partition on a dedicated SSD is used.
Because what slows down any unixoide operating system is slow access to files and RAM (everything is a file).

Oh, and please also make sure you have an x86 or x64 system that's supported.
I'd trying some free games from itch.io and check the Linux compatibility.
Most developers provide a Windows/macOS/Linux binary for download.
Some an Android (and iOS) version, too.
The Windows versions are most important to keep, I think, because Windows platform has high binary compatibility.
On *nix, by contrast, there had been multiple executable formats such as a.out, COFF, ELF and so on. Windows is using PE for ages.

PS: About processors.. In the past years, the importance of SSE4 has increased.
There's more and more software (esp. OSes such as Windows) that may need it.
So it makes sense to make sure any PC for recent use has SSE4.1 at least. SSE4.2 would be even better (it's the other half).
The Windows utility CPU-Z displays all the CPU instruction sets, I remember.
AVX/AVX-512 also is interesting, but normal software rarely use it so far.

I've been using Debian Linux as my daily machine for over decade now... Still using same install today with completely different hardware.
I have windows vm installed in the same machine as last resort, but haven't needed it in recent years.
For Linux gaming steam is the way to go, I have over 500 games steam game library and everything just works, proton have taken huge steps in the recent years.
I don't see any difference in the Linux vs windows desktops, I'm using gnome wayland desktop, and it just works.
My first family computer back in the day was 286 with ms-dos 5 so I'm no stranger to command line interface... and in 2025 Linux experience you still configure things faster through command line, when needed.

... And most importantly... it doesn't cost you anything to try Linux...

Most of my working career I have been a Unix user, so I am happy working in almost any unix-like environment. My day to day job involves supporting research activity and users on high end hardware and supercomputer level systems.

At home I've been a Linux-only user for around 20 years... but...

... the first question I would always ask is "why do you want to use Linux? What question do you think it will answer for you?"

Once you have an idea how to answer those questions, then you can work out how best to solve it with Linux, or if it is even the right answer.

TLDR: No.
You don't have to try Linux unless you really want to. If you have some specific Linux need, you are chasing different look, you want to use massive number of dev tools available, if you want to move to free software, if you want learn something new - go ahead!

If you're happy in current OS I think there's no gain.

Matth79 wrote on 2025-11-14, 01:23:

no stuff added that you didn't ask for, no telemetry.

By default it is less likely to happen but it's not true. They add things that nobody asks for. It mainly happens in corporate owned distros but community distros are not immune. I know it's forgotten now, there were ads in a big distro. Some OSes and programs have telemetry stuff build in. Most of the time it's opt-in but sometimes it's opt-out (Firefox, Chromium).

Get Linux.

As has been said - Linux is fantastic if you are a developer and want to do anything related to web, database or network programming.

Scientific computing and/or research is also second to none.
Where it suffers slightly is in consistency between software (there are dozens of different user interface toolkits; QT, GTK, wxwidgets etc), user-level system configuration (which can vary between desktop environments and distributions) - it's always worth learning the fundamentals underpinning these, rather than implementation specific examples. Another area which was historically lacking (admittedly not as much these days) art/creativity software.

For gaming the amount of native games isn't brilliant (but increases day by day - multi-platform SDK's like Unity and standardised libraries like OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenAL, SDL and more have made it much easier for developers to target Win/Mac/Linux simultaneously)... but in the last few years the ability to run Windows-native games on Linux has increased enormously. Take a look at my current games folder:

They are 95% Windows games, and, excluding Ghost of Tsushima, they play perfectly (Tsushima recently broke due to an Nvidia driver bug!). The capability of WINE and the improvements to it and graphics wrappers like dxvk due to Steam OS / Proton has meant that most titles (excluding the nasty ones with horrid DRM) have a fairly high chance of working either (a) out of the box, or (b) with only moderate tweaks on Linux.

I use Lutris to sandbox each game with its own dependencies, so you essentially have a dedicated version of Windows (or rather, the windows libraries) sitting alongside each game, so system updates, patches etc no longer impact the ability to run it. Lutris is one example, but there are others - they all more or less do the same thing; isolate an installation of a Windows game with the necessary dependencies.

But as others have essentially said - Linux is not a magic bullet. It has a learning curve and won't solve every problem - indeed it comes with it's own unique set of problems. If you are interested in some of those subject areas mentioned however, then it's always worth putting the time in to learn a new skill.

I started moving 100% to Linux 2 years ago when it became apparent, that I won't be a Windows 11 fan. But I'm a programmer, I've used Linux since the 90s and used it daily at work. I also didn't have to use apps not available on Linux. If you're mostly browsing the Internet, you won't even notice a difference. Gaming on Linux got significantly better since Valve started SteamOS, I'm gaming exclusively on Linux, but I don't game much these days and definitely no multiplayer games (requiring drastic anti-cheat measures). I'm using Fedora with KDE, because I was always a user of Red Hat derivatives, so I didn't have to relearn things and it contains bleeding edge software and KDE by default is quite friendly for someone used to Windows. If you're new and a gamer, then Fedora based Bazzite looks currently very promising.

If I could give you some advice, then don't focus on how the OS looks, focus on workflows and whether the differences affect your productivity. And always look forward, don't cling to old tech like the X Server, try Flatpaks from day one. The Linux desktop is always a moving target, and atomic distros (like Bazzite I've mentioned before) will be the next mayor step.

One important thing is that you need to approach it in the right way. Instead of complaining that some program that you're used to has issues running in Wine, you should look at what's available natively, i.e. focus on the task to be completed instead of the tool to be used. For example, what started out as a prerecorded macro in Photoshop might end up as a shell script exercising ImageMagick - very different workflows for the same result. (If I had to guess I'd say this is probably what drives most users away - things not working exactly as they used to, and them not wanting to spend the time to adapt. If that's you, just stay where you are and enjoy your start menu ads.) Another big change is that you'll be staying in your user directory 99% of the time. No more messing with system files and whatnot - that's a deeply ingrained urge you'll have to actively fight when coming from Windows. And building upon that - do make an effort to learn whichever package manager your distro has, and use it. Even for third party stuff. Ignoring its capabilities and installing software manually behind its back is asking for headaches (less so if the install is entirely contained to your home directory, but still). (imho the lack of a proper package manager is one of the biggest drawbacks of Windows. They're an incredibly use- and powerful class of tools. chocolatey, winget etc give you an idea but do not come close to the real thing.)