If one builds a desktop computer or asks the shop to, it does not automatically come with any operating system. This needs to be solved in one way or another.

1) Buy Windows 10 Home retail for €140 or save a tenner and get an OEM license for €130? The problem is that is quite a bit of money.

2) Install a retail copy of Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bits in a Virtual machine inside a Linux distro? I have never done anything with VMs but read that advanced access to the graphics card is a problem and that you need a bit more RAM. Would I need to go from 16GiB to 32GiB? Win 7 leaves out a couple of DX versions and it is not going to get better going forward.

3) Keep my old Windows 7 computer alongside a new one and install Linux on the new one. Crawling behind the computers on a daily basis is not an option so either double up on monitor, keyboard and mouse or get some switch box. I am sure such exists but at what charge? Annoynig to need two big cases.

4) No Windows at all. <gulp> Both Linux and Wine and DXVK have advanced in large strides but I am sure this would still leave me with 10-30% of my games unplayable or nearly so.



Will most probably not work:

- Install Windows 7 retail on the new computer. I highly doubt that would work. The VM model seems more tempting than this.



Not an option:

- Piracy, I fail to see any reason for this as there are other options.

- Buying a cheap license from a shady website. No, just no, even piracy is better than giving money to some criminals.

----------
Anything I did not think of? I wanted to list all points I could think of that are technical. Then there are also things like not wanting to support a mega corporation or not wanting to make life harder on oneself.

a small two device KVM (to switch between devices) is pretty cheap.

can buy a windows 10 64 bit DVD of ebay for £12.99 or get a USB stick and go to a friends computer and download ubuntu on that and then boot via USB for nothing

theres sellers on ebay who ahve over 100k stars who sell cheap windows dvd's. i can give u a windows 10 key for nothing and its legit

Ebay IS shady website.

you have buyer protection on ebay so even if u do get scammed u can get ur money back , someone with 100k stars isnt going to scam you

There are scammers there but to say it's 100% shady is inaccurate.

rolleyes
You can legally buy windows 10 for bunch of money. 12 is reselling key stuff. You do not buy keys G?A, then you don't buy keys for Microsoft on ebay. There are scammers on G?A and there are guys who send you the actual key. Still shady.

only a moron would spend over 100 euros on windows u can get DVD cheap on ebay or amazon, or if your to stubborn or paranoid to do that go with ubuntu as its free

I have Linux on my laptop and have been very satisfied with that but I also do not have but a very few games on it.

If buying a suspicously cheap Windows license and is lucky, I presume they are from mass licenses. Say a company has 812 PCs and buy a 1000 device license and then flog 100 for peanuts, keeping 88 in reserve. I do not think this is completly according to the license agreement but maybe it would work as long as Microsoft sees through the fingers with it. I would have no compunctions if the company in question is one I have worked for or am working for. What I am worried about are the old games that still do not work, The work on Wine has moved onto newer games, rightfully so imho.

What about old copy protections; do they work in Wine? Not buying ANY games with drm since many years ago but old discs are not so easily replaced sometimes.

I found this: https://wiki.winehq.org/Copy_Protection

I was actually talking about all sellers on eBay and not specifically key sellers(You are right that some are shady, though).....btw what does G?A stand for?

Replace the ? with a letter. You can pick the first one in the alphabet.

EDIT: So I had a short in my brain. It should be replaced with a number, not a letter.

I recently made the jump over to Linux Mint and couldn't be happier. I do everything that I used to do on Windows, most games work as well as before for me (Steam Proton and Lutris are excellent) and I don't miss any software. As a bonus, the OS is free and more stable.

Check out the Proton database to see which games work and how well they work on Steam:
https://www.protondb.com/

Here's Lutris if you wanna check that out, makes it really easy to set up games with Wine and have them all in one place.
https://lutris.net/

I still don't know what G-A-A is.

(nvm just got it...that one game series)

hmm, no not really. been buying quite a bunch of things on ebay, some things for over 500$, never had any problems, so far at least. but been using it for the last 5-6 years. so, not so shady in my experience so far.