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End of 10 is a campaign to move people over to Linux with Windows 10 support ending
(www.gamingonlinux.com)
this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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With the steam deck proving that Linux gaming was not only possible but easy, I could remove gaming as a reason to keep windows, which meant the only thing I actually wanted windows for was an Adobe subscription that I hadn't used in over a year. With windows fighting me the whole time, Linux got out of my way and let me use my own device how I wanted to. Which by the way sounds like I'm using it for something complicated or specialized but I'm not, I need it for web browsing, gaming, and light photo editing, that's about it.
So that's the positive case to move away from windows. The other side is that Windows is actively hostile to me as a user. I don't want or need copilot. For starters I don't have the hardware to really take advantage of it, and I don't want it using power unnecessarily. I don't want office 365, I don't want OneDrive, I don't want another UI on top of the 5 other UI frameworks that exist in windows which only serve to make it harder to change things to what I want. I don't want to sign in using a Hotmail account I made when I was 12 and haven't touched in years. I don't want windows telling Microsoft how I use my own device. There's some cool stuff in windows 11 like WSL which is awesome for me as a dev in my day job, but it's not enough to keep me in a system that, by design and direction, is trying to lock me into it.
Xbox app is another example, where my game controllers sometimes work and most of the time don't. Sometimes there's cross play with steam, sometimes not. Sometimes even installing the game doesn't work and I have to re-download the entire game again. Just bafflingly bad and costs me more than steam ever has. Ridiculous.
Gaming is the main reason I own a pc. I understand it's possible on Linux, but is it as easy as on Windows? Not to mention, that I pirate most of my games.
I am contemplating switching to Linux, but I am too afraid, that I will run into something I didn't realize windows is necessary for.
If you use Steam quite a bit, check out the ProtonDB Web site. That can tell you the level of compatibility. 90% of my library seemed to be covered, and it's seamless. I was impressed!
Edit to say: One problem I had was getting my Brother printer to work over WiFi. That was some annoying arcane wizardry, but I finally got it to work.
There are some games that don't work or don't work as well. Some anti-cheat systems don't work but the website protondb.com will tell you how compatible specific games are. For some people that's a deal breaker and that's ok, hopefully as adoption increases the situation will get better. I was disappointed to find out that vermintide 2 doesn't work for example.
I have no idea on the pirating side.
Most of my games work right out of the box, and the ones that have problems are ones that I'd also have to fiddle with for more than a 1-minute check to ProtonDB are ones I'd have to fiddle with on Windows. However I also do not touch anything with online multiplayer or anticheat, and I know games with kernel-level anticheat tend to not handle Linux well on anything but a Steam Deck.
I swapped a PC I had mostly for gaming over to Linux. I'm having a pretty nice time.
As for piracy, I know pirated games that need to be emulated because they are originally Nintendo Switch games or something work well. No idea for pirated PC games.