Linux

There's also Lutris, https://lutris.net/, which uses wine and other software underneath, but with a nice GUI and a lot of scripts to further make playing your games on Linux easier.

As far as I can tell it's mostly the TPM requirement and pushing more ads / AI nonsense.

You can easily avoid the latter by using the LTSC IoT version. I just bought a new (second hand) computer for TPM (my old one was very due for an upgrade).

With the IoT version it's absolutely fine. Definitely an improvement over Windows 10. The only issue I've noticed is it doesn't come with Windows Game bar or some nonsense so after you run games you'll get a random dialog about there not being an app available to handle ms-gamelink URLs or something. You can just ignore it. I might fix it one day.

Many can't upgrade to 11 and don't want to buy a new device. They'll believe it's their only option unless told otherwise. It's not necessarily a "Win11 is bad" or "Linux/BSD is better" scenario, just a "to keep using your current device which you paid for less than a decade ago, do the following".

Times are hard and people shouldn't be forced to buy new hardware because of the current monopolistic software companies's latest money making scheme, especially when their old one works perfectly fine and the environment is going to suffer.

Anti-privacy by default, pushing AI slop that takes all your data, more than one improperly checked update rolled out that bricked many computers, shoving Ads everywhere...

Of course you could say these to not be strictly new, but it is a new level of enshittification way beyond what we used to know.

I have a couple of reasons. The first and foremost is that I use windows for two things. Gaming (I dual boot windows and Bazzite for that to cover the few games I haven't gotten to work), and work. My work laptop has windows 10 because the IT department can't get some of the legacy software we rely on to do our jobs to work in 11. The compatibility layer originally wasn't there and now it only works some of the time and every time there's an update it breaks something. As a result we will likely be paying to continue to receive important security updates after 10 sunsets in October.

Additionally, some windows computers lose certain functionality when you install Linux (touchscreen compatibility, pen input compatibility etc. Can I update my personal surface pro to Linux? Yes. Will I? Unlikely. It's way more likely that I'll jailbreak it to force free security updates for the duration. I've run into way too much stuff I've had to have to IT department just straight up turn off in both 11 and 10. 11 is much worse for this though and subsequent updates have a habit of turning that stuff back on because MS wants that data.

So much new telemetry. So many new ads. So much random tracking. Swapping browsers to Edge. Copilot. Etc.

My fedora rig has secure-boot/tpm enabled. But getting that to work isn't something the average windows user is going to do. The average windows user doesn't ever open the command line in windows. And that's the thing I think people in the Linux community need to understand. I grew up with DOS. I spent 30+ years using the command line. I have used windows since 3.0. I have a general understanding of how to get what I want out of windows. I'm learning to do that with Linux but I have been on Linux for like a year and a half. The learning curve when you are already very familiar with something else and have muscle memory for something else is staggering. And I can fully understand why it might be exceptionally confusing and unintuitive for someone who's never had to use a terminal ever.

The fact is, most computer devices are phones. They use apps. There is some overlap in that with windows, but the plug and play nature of how these people are used to doing things is just as important to this conversation as just about ever other point.

Windows even pops up "helpful" tips and tricks because they know that people aren't windows savvy. I personally hate them but I'm not the average windows user.

I'd also like to point out that windows had the audacity to change the design language and somehow make a usable tablet environment worse in windows 11 in a bit to be more macOS-like and I personally really really hate that as well. I have my desktop and start menu set up in a way I like it and windows 11 completely ruins that and in my case makes things harder for me because I am fighting muscle memory. It's egregious to have to pay for the privilege of changing my start menu or task bar. I shouldn't have to go in and doctor what apps are allow during start up. I shouldn't have to turn off OneDrive or office 365. I shouldn't have to turn off telemetry or ads. This is a device I purchased and the OS is not supposed to spy on me.

Also, my $250 elgato capture card doesn't support Linux.

Which one? We use a few Elgato capture cards with OBS on Linux at work and all of them are bog-standard UVC video devices.

I played minecraft with my spouse

Check out Prism Launcher if you play Java Minecraft. It allows you to easily manage multiple Minecraft versions. Modded, unmodded, different versions, etc..

Sounds like something went wrong with the installation. Mint is overall more performant than windows. What slowed down?

Similar with me, but Kubuntu. Installed Steam and started downloading some games, and the whole system became almost unusable until it had finished. Also I put some music on (YouTube), and the audio was slightly slowing down and speeding up.

I have used Linux for decades for servers, and I really want to move to Desktop Linux, but at least once a year I try and there is some major issue that stops me.