Windows is undoubtedly the most used OS by millions of people around the world. Back in 2021, Microsoft quietly announced that Windows 10 will retire Oct 14, 2025 with no further updates provided and slowly introduced Windows 11 to the messes.

Windows 11 have introduced TPM 2.0 requirements and on top of that it required minimum of 8th Gen Intel or AMD Zen 2 Processor. This intently made millions of powerful rigs “obsolete” for no reason. And another reason is unwanted apps or missing features and performance issue has caused many to think about switching to Linux.

Following the end of Windows 10. Many have switched to Linux. But Linux is not without it’s problems too.

1. Software Support

Wine existed for awhile to basically to run Windows apps on Linux. But your Adobe apps, Microsoft office apps, your 3D software and your music daw do not play nicely with Linux and this is where WinBoat tries to solve the problem.

WinBoat runs a stripped-down and lightweight version of Windows inside a docker container on Linux. While it attempts to solve some of the problems when comes to app compatibility. However, it introduced more problems when comes to driver support and GPU acceleration.

GPU rendering are done entirely by translating it into your CPU via software rendering. Which means your graphical intensive apps can’t see or use your GPU even if wanted to.

Apps like Photoshop will open and run, but heavy filters are bound to choke and lag. Some other graphical intensive apps won’t even open.

2. Driver Support

While support for AMD/Intel drivers are up there. Nvidia historically for not allowing it’s drivers to run on Linux. If you have seen the finger flip by Linus Torvalds back in 2012. Today, proprietary Nvidia drivers, CUDA, and Vulkan support are heavily integrated into major Linux distros out of the box. But G-Sync still works better on Windows.

Software control suits for your gaming mouse/keyboard does not exist on Linux, meaning – you can not run Corsair iCUE, Razer Synapse or Logitech G Hub natively. Because of this, users has to rely on open-source alternative without full function support.

Many other drivers are mixed bag on Linux because they were exclusively designed for Windows and Mac. Driver support rely on custom drivers created by the community.

Just like app support for DAWs, setting up audio interface like Windows ASIO dose not exist on Linux. Wi-Fi chips that uses Realtek or Brodacom are finicky and won’t work out of the box requires wired tethering to your Linux PC just to download community made drivers unless you have a Linux distro that has newer kernels and support those drivers out of the box.

3. Gaming On Linux

This is where it breaks for me. I remember couple of years ago, if you wanted to play games on Linux, you would need a native Linux port of the game since Proton support still in it’s infancy.

With the introduction of Steam Deck, Valve has stepped up in terms of gaming support by improving it’s Proton layer (based on Wine). Proton basically let Windows games to run on Linux and the list of games are growing as we speak.

Unfortunately Proton still cannot tackle the hurdle of anti-cheat and there isn’t simply a easy way around it with EA famously removing support for Apex Legends over rampant cheating on Linux platforms.

Fragmented Linux

Linux doesn’t just come in one package like Windows or MacOSx, it comes in variety of desktop environments, editions, flavors, kernels for different needs. If you need server setup or just testing Linux on older laptops or running Steam Deck is perfectly fine for that. 3D processing is where Linux still fail short when comes to mainstream apps.

Until then, Windows is the necessary evil I can’t live without.