My current internal struggle is which is the better trade off. Fight ads on Windows 11 or fight getting games to work on my Linux Distro of choice. I should just dual boot and fight both battles at the same time.
Microsoft kills products this way. In Win 8 they killed OneNote which was a pretty good product by pinning 3 icons for it in the task bar. And putting it in all kinds of context menus, and putting it in as a printer, and trying to stuff it up your nose. It had a decent XML file format that I could extract content from but what really killed it for me was when it went cloud only and those files went away.
Then there is the strange case of SkyDrive, that they failed to run a trademark search on before launching, so they had to rename it to OneDrive. They set the default for Office to save to OneDrive. Well once I forgot to save elsewhere and OneDrive wasn’t working so I couldn’t save. And this is a product that is always harassing me about some document I didn’t save 5 years ago. That’s not how you kill a product, that is how you kill it, kill it again and kill it once more.
A lot of time is spent synching to the cloud. Also, "Date modified" metadata was all reset at the time of transition, so distinguishing "pre-OneDrive" files by date is not a thing anymore.
Two other things that irk me with Linux is Remote Desktop and internal drives. Remote desktop on Windows has been solved at the basic+ level for years (RDP, Terminal Services). VNC on Linux is often barely useable or a lag filled struggle, even on LAN. I know there are 3rd party solutions, but none are cheap (TV, AnyDesk, etc) or as elegant (NoMachine, etc) out of the box as RDP. I should be able to turn on a toggle "Enable Remote Desktop" and connect from a client machine. I guess that's why Gnome is moving that way? I don't know.
The next is on Windows I typically have a plethora of random internal drives I use for storage, scratch disks for downloads or video encoding, temp storage, etc. These just format and assign a drive letter and done. Maybe I haven't done it enough but it always requires a guide, editing fstab, getting permissions right, mounting it as a folder or other witchcraft. Again this is probably me, but it's harder than it needs to be, IMHO.
Back on gaming, Steam really doesn't get enough credit. They have pushed developers to consider Linux for the first time in history. They have helped create the tools and the store front. The steam deck is a good PoC. And now that game engines are allowing cross platform type tools, it's never been easier.
Time will tell, but just like Firefox, I hope Linux on the desktop sticks around.
I've used other O&O software (backup) and found it to be pretty solid, so when they first released this tool back for Windows 10 I was surprised to see it free.
AppBuster is another good freebie from them.
The only reason I boot into windows is for windows-only games. Life gets a little less stressful when you have some options and choices.
Or buy some gaming console.
And you can only game on it, you can't do anything else with it. In 2 years you easily spend up to 1000 dollars on it, which in comparison could get you the most expensive GPUs other than the 4090.