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I'm going the other way. I'm fed up with expensive hardware which will fail from designed in defects (just lost my macbook pro 15 to stagelight). Every version of Mac OS makes it harder to set up a dev environment, especially for beginners. I'm in the academic world, we have A LOT of beginners. I am a fan of Linux, but the recent systemd/wayland drama moved it further away from "year of linux desktop",IMHO. Getting older, I am less interested in tinkering with the base system. (Linux is still king for me for servers, obviously. Maybe I'll try one of the BSDs at some point).

In the windows world, you have a much wider choice of price point for hardware, you don't have to worry about drivers, "does netflix work" etc. With WSL2, I can run all the applications I need (and I develop mostly in WSL2). It's trivial to explain a student how to set it up, much more convenient than dual booting, or running a classic VM.

I use Pop!_OS(https://pop.system76.com) as my daily driver and there's no "tinkering with the base system" involved. Give it a try!

My main gripe is that, according to some of the comments, a Microsoft account will be required, at least for the home version. It might seem like nitpicking, and perhaps many people wouldn't consider it a major hurdle, but if I'm paying for an OS, I like the idea of it being a product and not a service, especially if it's paid for as a product. Tying logins more strongly to online accounts also sounds bad from a privacy perspective, and I'd like any online services to be there only if I need them, not pushed to me as a necessity.

Essentially, I want the core software on my computer to just provide a working environment for me and my applications. I don't want it to be an entire online system of services the vendor wants me to want. Helpful additional services are nice, but none of it should be required for a product to work.

I'm also not fond of the idea of having to explain to my elderly parents why they need to register for yet another online account with yet another litany of terms and conditions just in order to use their computer.

> My main gripe is that, according to some of the comments, a Microsoft account will be required

While I don't use Windows at home, if I did, this would be a complete dealkiller.

I was Linux-only at home (and, incidentally, also for work) for years but decided to keep the Windows install that came on my current laptop because I started gaming a bit more again.

I don't know if logging in will still be possible without phoning home and automatically logging in to various MS services every time, but if it's not or if MS just keeps turning Windows further into an online service (and the customer into a product), it'll probably be time to go Windows-less again.

Maybe run Windows in a VM with your GPU passed through.

Same, and same for MacOS if on your own hardware. Instead I'm looking to Linux; I've been testing it as a desktop system in a VM for work and enjoying it.

I need to keep Adobe Creative Suite running which is the only software likely to prevent this happening; now that the online version of Word is improved then customer expectations that I have Word & Excel are mostly matched (I won't revisit the problems with LibreOffice et al here - the Microsoft version still wins out when everyone else is using it).

For me Unreal Engine is the bottleneck. It does run on Linux, but the experience is not frictionless (relatively speaking, for that software :) )

I'm in the same boat. The UE dev workflow is the first issue, but there's also the surrounding ecosystem for me like the Epic launcher, Substance, Bridge, Mixer and Affinity that I don't want to have to replace and also don't have time to fiddle with if they don't work 100%.

My experience moving away from the happy path by doing UE dev on a Mac a few years ago was so painful I have a hard time believing the linux experience is going to be a net win. Unless you're using the same tools as Epic, shit just seems to break a lot.

> You were never, in the past, forced to upgrade hardware because Windows flat-out refused to run on it.

You definitely were, I had to upgrade to a newer laptop because versions of Windows after 7 didn't support 32-bit processors without PAE (this mattered to me because my laptop had a Pentium M).

ooh, interesting. I did not know that. That must have been annoying.

I have plenty of old laptops sitting in drawers that I can't use with cli only Linux because so many of the distos have a kernel that insists on PAE which most of them don't have. As such I leave them running XP which is a shame as they'd be perfect as little Linux boxes for tinkering.

Q4OS (https://q4os.org/) is a Debian based linux designed explicitly for this use case -- with a prominent 32 bit version.

Brilliant, I'll check it out. Cheers!

If it helps, v3.8 is guaranteed to be okay without PAE (go with trinity, based on KDE 3.5 as a DM, rather than plasma) -- from their release notes:

>Q4OS Centaurus is based on Debian Buster 10 and Plasma 5.14, optionally Trinity 14.0.6, desktop environment, and it's available for 64bit and 32bit/i686pae computers, as well as for older i386 systems without PAE extension. We are working hard to bring it for ARM devices too.

it's not there to protect users against malware

it's there to protect "content producer's" business models against you

and MS are hoping to take a cut of that

Check out PopOS if you're going to dip into Linux. It sits on top of Ubuntu and provides a good out of the box experience.

PopOS is a great distro for people just hopping over and new to Linux. All the software and features most people want are there and easy to install, with even Steam/Gaming being just a click or two away.

Isn't it great, some years ago, ubuntu "was sitting on top of debian", but provides a good out of the box experience. Don't get me wrong, I like ubuntu a lot, but I wonder if we have a "NOPEos" in 5 years, sitting on top of PopOS.

It's turtles all the way down.

Maybe. Ubuntu's gotten burned a few times in trying new UI paradigms, so now they're fairly conservative and have settled into a model where they make their money on the server.

TPM does make disk encryption more simple and effective for a typical user.

but would TPM prevent you from downloading ransomware that encrypts your files ? It doesn't seem so to me, but I have not delved very deep into how Windows uses TPM.

It does not, once the system has booted, the TPM doesn’t protect you. (For drive encryption purposes)

It doesn't. If you are familiar with Apple Secure Enclave/T2 and Google Secure Element, they are same thing. It just hold the encryption keys and validate them to the system. Bitlocker use TPM to validate the key before unlocking the volume or the entire disk to the system.

What you are thinking of is the Windows Defender, it have the capabilities to prevent a thing like that.