I think you should use whatever you feel comfortable with. For me I left Windows around Windows 98 SE to Windows XP era. It was not for me. Been on Linux since. It's where I'm most comfortable. Around 2000 I joined an IT Firm in NYC with sister agencies in LA and Chicago. Regardless of what everyone tells me I based my opinion on Linux on two factors - 1) How easy it makes my home computing life 2) How many contracts I get for it's usages/installation/support. The home life has always been easy for me with Linux, since it allows me to do as I please. Mind you I stick to native games and apps and call it a day. Work life has been an adventure to say the least.

The IT firm that I joined was at the beginning Unix, Eagle (Medical Software) and Windows based contract services. In 2003, the company started taking on Linux based contract work. Eagle was phased out around 2008 and Unix last contract for our company followed the same year with a very small few still around for some bigger companies. So we had Windows and Linux contracts with Linux based contracts being 5% to 8% of the business. In 2010, that number went from 8% to 23%, I can't tell you what happened but I will say that A LOT of DOE schools, charter schools, non-profits, after school programs and small businesses were ASKING for Linux right out of the gate. We provided training, installation and onsite and remote support services.

Around this time the company officially formed a Linux division. I applied and went in. Instant 17k on top of my previous pay. I've not worked on any other contract work outside of Linux since. In 2015 to 2017, we had another major spike in contract work putting the overall contract numbers at 43.5%. It's been hovering around there since with small blips of increases here and there but negligible decreases. When ppl talk about how hard Linux is...What I look at is our tickets intake and compared to our Windows divisions and outside of server maintenance and repair - it's nothing. Last month we got 12 calls and 2 emails. Window divisions stays in the 200+ calls with over 50 emails easily. Now we are getting ChromeOS and other cloud related contracts. Which I believe will start to crush all of our other divisions.

In 2017, I took on a side job working with Building Management Services companies in the Tri-state area for every other weekend helping a friend start his own business up. Many of the offices I walked into were either phasing Windows out or using older versions of Windows (with no desire to upgrade - intraoffice work), already using Linux, ChromeOS or some custom OS based on android for their workflow. The money in this sector is CRAZY.

In my personal opinion, I think the nature of the modern computing work and home life is vastly different from how it was before. So when ppl advocate for against an OS with that old mindset, I just sit back and collect my checks. As children are growing up using GSUITE/Google Workspace and it's free office alternatives the formal grip that other OSes have on market share will become a moot point as the cloud is calling.

Why would there not be enough space on a laptop? Sure, they come with pathetic amounts of storage, but that's the easiest part of a laptop to upgrade. My laptop came with a 1TB SATA drive, but now I have a 1TB nvme drive and a 4TB SATA SSD (I was considering upgrading the nvme to 2TB, but not yet). Currently all of the gog games I own (which are not hidden) are installed on my machine (sometimes twice, when I haven't yet tested if the newer version works after an update), although I will eventually prune that a bit.

edit: I should also mention that replacing the internal drive is the first thing I usually do, even before the first boot, to replace Windows with Linux as quickly and easily as possible.

edit 2: I was going to address your second question as well, but I'll leave it at low buying impulse resistance to games in genres I like, even if they end up not working on my machine (but 90%+ do work; I could provide more accurate numbers if I wasn't too lazy to keep my database up-to-date). Plus sometimes I buy games because I'm bored and/or depressed. I own way too many games on gog, but before gog I also owned way too many collection CDs & such, all of which died in a fire.

My old ASUS G75W gaming laptop originally came with one 750GB HDD, but nowadays it has a total 6TB of internal HDD space (3 x 2TB HDDs inside; one of which is where the internal DVD-RW drive used to be, but it got broken and I didn't use it much anyway, so I replaced it with an internal HDD bay. If I need to use DVD-RW with this laptop, I have an external USB DVD-RW drive for that).

One of those 2TB HDDs is reserved for Linux, two for Windows 7 (NTFS). I am using Linux much more on this laptop so having two "Linux partitions" would make more sense, but then the NTFS partitions can be easily accessed also from Linux so it doesn't matter that much.

But doesn't that make the laptop rather heavy?

Windows fanatics are OK. Noted. :P LOL! Just admit, you've made the thread for our entertainment.
This is not new. I mean, the article. I believe, I've read it several years ago, it just got "updated" recently. Like, replacing "7" with "10" at every occurrence adjacent to "Windows". :)

Apart from that, the article is a sad story, really. This "Dan Price" is basically trying to convince himself that no matter what state "Windows" is, this could be worse had he be forced to use Linux. Some examples:

"f you're in the market for a new Windows machine, you have one choice: Windows 10. Sure, there are a couple of slight variations, such as Pro, S, and Enterprise… But if you're a first-time user looking for a new Linux machine? It's time to go back to school."

"Yes, we know, Windows is far from perfect… (but) If you made 77 percent of the world start using a Linux-based desktop computer tomorrow, we guarantee you'd see infinitely more posts complaining about things not working than you do for Windows."

"Windows typically gets new drivers first… Linux-based systems are lucky if they receive any drivers."

The whole "article" is basically like, "Listen, pal, just stay with Windows! Believe me, with Linux it is even worse. I've asked the 77 of silent majority and all of them are totally OK with Windows; trust me." ;)

I wonder if it is a bot, which just got the keywords "Linux" and "Windows" in the message subject, and instantly knew to send some generic "Windows vs Linux" message to the discussion?

At least that would explain why the content of the message, while still relevant to "Windows vs Linux", seemed to have very little, if anything, to do with either the article, or anything that anyone else has said in this thread.

Yeah, as if Linux users all the time tout how great it is how, unlike on Windows, you can install and run different programs on Linux... sheesh...

Considering it is a "desktop replacement" laptop that is quite heavy to begin with (not the kind of laptop you want to carry around in one hand with your coffee in the other hand), and whose power supply unit is the size and weight of a building brick (almost)... I don't think it really matters.

Also remember that the internal 2TB HDDs are the smaller and lighter 2.5" HDDs, not the desktop 3.5" HDDs. They are not THAT heavy, in fact they are quite small and light now that I think about it. I just checked the weight of one of my 2.5" HDDs, and it is 96 grams (=3.3863 ounces or whatever fake weight units you people use in the US...).

Anyway, I guess nowadays it is all about nvme or SATA SSDs, where the weight is near negligible. This is about 9 years old laptop so I am using 2.5" HDDs with it. I am not expecting to install any internal HDDs into my next gaming laptop, even if it had a an internal SATA HDD bay. The 1TB (and bigger) SSDs have finally come down to tolerable prices for me to consider them for daily use; external USB HDDs still for offline archives, like all my 2105 GOG game installers, as HDDs still win in the $/GB ratio, easily. And HDDs are more suitable for offline archives than SSDs as you don't need to "power refresh" the HDDs every now and then to retain the data.

For me the best advantage linux had was the bash terminal... But right now you can get a linux sub-system on windows in a easy and supported way and it's great for that.
I got only one problem with Linux as a main system and it's not even the lack of software, you need to be really careful when you update, anything can break (if you update wine you can break so many things, so you need to create a wine wrapper everytime to avoid that kind of problem).
I even tried mac os (a mix between windows and linux in the end... it was a great system with good software support that is hold back by apple... with updates that break compatibility with 32 bits software (yes most of the games) with no valid reasons and only compatible with mac hardware).
back on the list:
1. Yes it's a big problem that you need to solve with wine or dual boot.
There are many alternatives to software but none to games (each game is one of a kind).
2. Yes again, it's not easy to find updated version when something break.
3. No, you just need to install linux on most system. It's easy and you need to do it only one time. But Yes on the many distro part, for the most part just use Ubuntu (the most supported distro) or you will get in trouble even with basic linux software (that's another problem, some software for linux only works on some level to any distro).
4. Yes. Windows 10 bugs are nothing compared to linux bugs. I lost many hours just on my dual boot steamos/ubuntu/archlinux distro.
5. No. I never used support for windows or linux... If I need help I just use google.
6. For the most part No.
7. Yes and No. Yes for new triple A games. No thanks to wine but you need a different configurations everytime and it's not that easy.
8. No. That's old story.
9. Not even a point
10. It's the point 4 2.0 Not even a point again.

I think linux should be used as a secondary system or, like windows 10 call it, a sub-system. It's great for command line software.

I'm still trying to comprehend the motive and purpose of bash in Windows, and where does it leave e.g. PowerShell? Don't they both have the same purpose?

I presume it is so that people who are more familiar with bash (like me) and possibly have lots of bash scripts and tricks in their sleeve, can use Windows more comfortably.

But it just feels odd that then Windows has three different "command prompts":
1. The old Command Prompt (cmd.exe)
2. PowerShell
3. bash (optional)

Already now when you look at many Windows instructions online (e.g. when I searched for instructions how to compress hundreds of subfolders into separate 7-zip archives with command-line 7z.exe), there were different instructions for the old command prompt, and then some came with "if you can use powershell, you can also try this...".

I don't know why MS felt it needs to divide the "command prompt" to several alternatives... I know cmd.exe is there mainly for backwards compatibility because people already have their .BAT files and whatever, but couldn't they have e.g. expanded that cmd.exe in Windows 7 and 10 with the advanced "powershell features", instead of making the two separate?

How is that specifically a Linux problem, that an update to an external program like WINE might kill some backwards compatibility?

(ie. that program might work differently and need some different options with the new version, like how WINE version 3.20 or such apparently enabled BY DEFAULT "csmt" which apparently helps with some game's performance, but breaks e.g. the Infinity Engine RPGs (Baldur's Gate 1-2, Icewind Dale 1-2 etc.)? Then again the fix was pretty simple, just disable csmt if you want to play those RPGs...).

I presume the same can and does happen also on Windows.

I guess the problem is that people don't want to do only one or the other, but both.

My experience with BSD comes only from running FreeBSD on VirtualBox, to learn more about OpenZFS and also BSD itself in case any client would ask if they could get a BSD server online (but they usually seem to want either Ubuntu or RHEL servers...).

Anyway, to me setting up and running FreeBSD feels mainly like... Linux 20 years ago. :D It just felt oddly clunky, a bit like the old times when being a "Linux user" meant always compiling the whole kernel or separate programs from the source codes yourself, etc. (I guess some Linux users are still like that; Arch or Slackware?).

One "surprise" was that the basic FreeBSD installation didn't apparently come with any window manager/desktop environment, but you just booted to the terminal (command prompt). Ok, a server OS rather than a desktop OS, I guess. Not that different from installing e.g. Ubuntu Server which doesn't come with any GUI/desktop environment by default either, as that is unneeded on a server.

Finding instructions how to install a GUI in FreeBSD didn't take long, just followed clear instructions and quite soon I had a desktop environment running in FreeBSD. I don't recall what DE it is (GNOME for all I know...), it feels basic but functional. It still feels oddly "clunky", like when I open a terminal window, the fonts are all over the place, e,g,. there are odd, uneven, caps here and there between both single words and even single characters. So it feels a bit like "justified" text in Word where the whole line is always spread out from side to side, only worse. It just looks odd. (I'd add a screenshot but now I am on a different PC than where that virtual machine is running...).

Also, since I haven't tried FreeBSD on bare metal (running on my PC, not as a virtual machine), how is its driver support, like does it have any working drivers for NVidia Geforce and AMD GPUs, that possibly can run games too? Does the audio work fine etc.?

How about the software support, does it come with common (graphical) applications that a desktop (home or office) user might want to use, like:

- Libre Office (I presume it has this, I didn't check...)
- a RDP client like Remmina (maybe VNC works for that... I use Remmina on Linux and it works great to connect to e.g. Windows servers).
- TeamViewer and/or AnyDesk? I guess Google's remote desktop software with Chromium probably works, but its downside is that it doesn't survive reboots like TeamViewer and AnyDesk do.
- VLC (again, I presume and hope it does, or something similar)
. MS Teams, Skype (yes Linux has those too)
and so on and so forth?

So I am still unsure how suitable BSD is for all-around desktop usage, but at least it has an optional desktop environment...

Invalid recursion: its support for itself is lacking :P.

It really just sounds like (yet again) Orkhepaj that you're really hurt and traumatised by your limited experience on Linux that you could never figure out.

And that's fine. Not everyone is capable of basic troubleshooting on operating systems, whether it's on Linux or Windows.

Yet there's no reason to trash other people's experiences who have found Linux superior in almost every way and use it happily as their daily driver.

I'm not sure I've ever met anyone with such a rampant fanatical hatred of a mere operating system. Imagine if you channeled all that energy into something useful? Who knows, you could solve world hunger, climate change or peace for all.

Two words that strike fear into any Linux user:
Kernel panic

The software compatibility is different. While cmd is obsolete, powershell and bash are both equally good and up to date.
I use bash for command line linux (unix) software.

of course the main problem is that you need to use wine that you don't need on windows.
since you need to use it the fact that update to linux can break it is a problem.

It can but it usually don't.

dunno , according to them it is not frequent