I've distro hopped and DE hopped a lot before settling, but it's been amazing for me as somoeone who has switched over from Windows. It just doesn't get in the way, is super familiar for me, AND lets me do a lot of things I wish I had in Windows.

I was worried about the "choice fatigue" due to it being super configurable and all, but honestly the defaults are so sensible I haven't really had a reason to tinker with it much if at all.

If market forces respond as they do for gamers, we will be seeing a lot of peripheral manufacturers at least ensuring their devices are covered by a generic driver on Linux, and eventually those gamers will be installing linux on their parents computers to avoid expensive memory upgrades. Games publishers are likely to take notice. And at least small PC retailers will be offering customs without Windows, assuming a couple of the big hardware guys dont start offering it too.

I made the old joke tongue in cheek, but it does have legs tbh. This is basically a perfect storm, that any previous management at Microsoft would have fired half the business to prevent. Focusing on optimisation rather than bloat would be a better strategy. But IIRC the management of Microsoft believe the cloud is the future and were thinking desktop was dead anyway.

The conditions were set in 2025, but 2026 is probably when we will see the greatest amount of switching.