I was hoping this would be about WINE.. I've seen old software run better/safer in WINE than Windows, but I'm hesitant to get involved in recommending anything to people with legacy software problems. There is virtually no upside..
Control of privacy, auto-updates, and MS crapware is very difficult under the moving goalposts of Win10.
Cost to shift to Win10 is high in terms of training, switching over software, dealing with new drivers, and undoing undesirable changes with each update; meanwhile end-user benefit ranges from negative to slightly positive, depending who's measuring.
I agree that switching to Linux would be worse than Win10, before even considering all the Win-only software.
And the irony was, Microsoft's "upgrade to Windows 10" program claimed they will be OK. Only afterwards, running 10, the old drivers misbehave, and the newer simply don't exist. And it's not that the hardware producer is some small company, it's Intel who doesn't want to produce newer updates of their drivers for their older hardware.
The another irony is that the Linux also has driver and desktop performance problems, resulting in WLAN not working but also local videos stuttering, if they are using more modern codecs and higher resolution: mplayer running on Windows manages to play the same videos OK which the mplayer on Linux plays unstable. So it's still https://xkcd.com/619/ "but who uses that?" even when striking out the flash word. On such desktops, VM with Linux will work, but don't expect miracles for demanding content.
So if you are on Windows 7 'for privacy considerations', but use it as a gaming machine, then I have a bridge to sell you.
maybe for next year or so. For one, it's reaching EOL so no security patches. There's extended support to 2023 but it costs $$$ and it's uncertain how reliably you could pirate it. Even if you ignore security patches, you're going to have to deal with developers dropping support for windows 7, so there are going to be more and more games that require windows 10, and getting updated graphics drivers might be tricky.
But is it because many distros don't ship with the Nvidia drivers and then people run into issues with Nouveau, or break something by installing the closed source driver manually or from a 3rd party repository and then get incompatible/broken libraries, wrong kernel versions and stuff like that?
Or is there really something wrong with the drivers themselves? (let's ignore optimus...)
Btw, have you tried using Wayland?
""" Only the first two [standard graphics APIs] are implemented by the Nvidia proprietary driver. In order to support Nvidia, Wayland compositors need to add code resembling this:
if (nvidia proprietary driver) { /* several thousand lines of code / } else { / several thousand lines of code */ } """
From: https://drewdevault.com/2019/02/10/Wayland-misconceptions-de...
If you want open software you need FOSS. Nvidia is not even close to FOSS. AMD is closer to FOSS.
Just because it's closed doesn't mean the driver is bad from a purely technical/functional point of view and for many people that might be enough. The parent sounded like Nvidia GPUs just don't work well under Linux, and from my experience that's just not the case. And the open AMD drivers took many years to get to the level they are now.
Technical issues with Nvidia I can think of are the EGLStreams with Wayland and Optimus.
I'm running the closed source Nvidia drivers and everything runs 100%. I can run most games as well.