I Don't See a Reason to Switch to Windows from Linux Anymore in 2025

Okay, look, I don't want to be a hater, I promise. I have a setup with a Linux dual boot in my computer right now. But man, the crazy echo chamber around this issue is not just delusional, it's counterproductive. Being in denial about the shortcomings isn't particularly helpful in expanding reach, if that's what you all say you want.

So, in the spirit of balance, my mostly unbiased take on the listicle:

1 - Web tools get the job done: This is true when it's true. I work with Google's office suite, so yeah, many tools are indistinguishable. But not all tools are web tools. A big fallacy in this article is that just because a subset of items have embraced a solution doesn't mean that the solution is universal. If you need to work with Adobe software you're still SOL. MS Office still lacks some features on the web app. Some of the tools I use don't work, so I do still need to run those in a native Windows app. Since I'm not going to switch OSs every time I need to push a particular button, I'm going to default to Windows for work.

2 - Plenty of distros to suit your preference: This one is an active downside, and it pisses me off when it gets parroted. When I last decided to dual boot Linux I had to try five different distros to find one that sort of did everything I needed at once, which was a massive waste of time. I'm talking multiple days. Yes, there are a ton of distros. I only need to use one, though. But I need that one to work all the time. If one of the distros can get my HDR monitor to work but not my 5.1 audio and another can get my 5.1 audio setup to work, but not my monitors, then both distros are broken and neither is useful to me. This actually happened, incidentally.

3 - Steam has a decent collection of Linux games, plus Steam OS: Yes. Gaming on Linux is possible and works alright, but it's far from perfect. Features my Nvidia card runs reliably on Windows are hit-and-miss under Linux. Not all games are compatible in the first place, either. And while Heroic does a great job of running my GOG and Epic libraries, which are themselves just as big as my Steam one, it is a much bigger hassle to set up to run under the SteamOS game mode UI. Don't get me wrong, this has made huge strides but again, I'm not going to change OSs every time I hit a compatibility snag. This is the least fallacious of these points, though.

4 - Proprietary choices on Linux: Yes, there are some. Like the web app thing, the problem isn't what is there, it's what's missing. Also, as a side note, I find it extremely obnoxious when you have to enable these manually as an option in your package manager. As a user I don't care if a package is open source or not, I just want to install it.

5 - Electron makes app availability easier. Cool. Will take your word for it. Acknowledging the ideological debate behind it goes to the same argument I made in the previous point. And as above, it's not about what's there, it's about what's missing.

6 - No ads in your OS. I mean... nice? I still get ads for my selected distro on first boot, as well as on web apps and notifications for installed apps. Beyond a few direct links to first party apps in the one page of Win 11's settings app I don't find anything in Windows particularly intrusive, either. Which is not to say I don't dislike some of the overly commercial choices in Windows, they're just not a dealbreaker... yet.

7 - Docker, Homelab and self-hosting: This is... off topic, honestly. I do self host some things. Even used Docker once or twice... in my NAS, where the self-hosting happens. You don't need to switch your home desktop to Linux for that, and nobody is questioning that Linux is the OS of choice for a whole host of device ranges, from servers to the Raspberry Pi. Linux is great as a customizable underlying framework to build fast support for a niche device with a range of specific applications. We should be honest about how that breaks down if you try to use it as a widely accessible home computer alternative where the priorities are wide compatibility and ease of use.

Well, that became a huge thing, but... yeah, I guess I was annoyed enough by the delusion to rant. Look, I'd love to step away from Windows, and it's a thing you can do if you're tech savvy and willing to pretzel around the limitations in your hardware choices and your willingness to tinker... but it's not a serious mainstream alternative by a wide margin. I wish it was. Self-congratulatory praise within the tiny bubble of pre-existing fans (and why are there fans of operating systems in the first place?) is not going to help improve or widen its reach.

Why is this thread getting flooded with people saying how they can't use Linux? Isn't that a little odd coming from a Linux community?

i never saw one to begin with

My reason is that VR gaming is not feasible on Linux, so I need to keep a Windows VM to play VR games.

I said this in another thread but I set up a windows vm for someone because they needed it to run literally one scam tax software, otherwise they had no reason to switch back from Linux.

Even stuff like icue that uses windows drivers for peripherals will run in a VM with USB pass through.

And even then there's a nice open source alternative for icue; you only need it if you want to edit hardware profiles.

I’ve been planning to switch my PCs at home to Linux as a winter project this year.

I just installed a new SSD and put Mint on the main newer machine yesterday. Nary a speed bump in the process, and it’s so nice to have the snappy desktop and update experiences I’m used to from running Linux all day at work.

Like most articles on itsfoss, this one is only a notch over clickbait — a kernel of an idea not fully developed, written with the last minute energy of a student who pushed off the assignment until right before deadline — but I'll be damned if that title isn't beautifully turned.

I haven't had to have Windows installed for more than a decade, but on recent occasion I've borrowed Windows and Mac computers for work. Those revisits didn't give me reason to switch back, only to long for my lean Arch install.

As the next major version of Windows approaches like a Santa down the chimney with all sorts of "AI"-infested gadgets in his sack, I do hope more will make the more often mentioned switch to a Linux distro from the advertising platform OS that came with their computer.

But this headline deliciously reminds us that there is already a good chunk of users who made the jump, or are sitting on the dual booting fence, one boot (sorry!) on either side. This article is for them, yes, but also a gentle nudge for those still gathering courage.

At this stage, it is time to seriously change the perspective of that switch. The single reason for switching from Windows to Linux is ... the utter state of Windows. Only the most blinkered of tech journos can continue to pretend that all is well on Windows, and not at all a sophisticated malware infection.

So bravo itsfoss for the clever barb, less so for the depth of the article itself.

My daughter wants to play Sims 3 and use her Zune. I'm sure it's possible to do both with enough work and time spent tracking down old utilities but how much time do I want to spend on that when I could just crank out a VM.

I wish. NVIDIA is still a buggy mess for me, and it seems that I am the only person with these issues, I see people praising NVIDIA on Wayland all the time now.

And VR is still bad on Linux.

I still love Linux, but I can't use it for now. God i miss NixOS );

"Anymore"? I haven't ever owned a Windows machine, and I haven't used a Windows machine since 2015. I do have to fix a random issue on my wife's work laptop about once a month.

I get that there are some things some people can't do without and which keeps them in Windows: games, and requirements of their business (Word, Excel, PPT), but nothing about Linux has gotten significantly better in recent years. Incrementally, over there past decade, sure, but no big, recent change that might justify the title.

Except in the same way I've never needed Windows: in a very specific, individual way.

People who come here to say Linux is not good or that this community is an echo chamber and get mad for pointing out obvious flaws in the OS miss two things:

1. The post is an opinion of someone. Notice the "I" in the title? That should give you some clue.

2. You are offended when people suggest that you learn and adapt to the OS, but you suggest that Linux should support your workflow without any effort on your part to learn the OS. Which is hypocritical to say the least.

@Sunshine Agree! Left Windows decades ago. Except for some ocassional office compability snafus and still poor gaming, it does everything I need and well.

1. Web-based tools get the work done: agreed,especially when half of these web tools are Electron like number 5
2. Plenty of distributions to suit your preference: my personal favorite thing about Linux
3. Steam has a decent collection of Linux Games (& you may get a console): True,And outside of steam will work nicely aswell (like touhou 6 for example like Proton/soda does a great job of running touhou 6 patched with THCRAP)
4. Proprietary choices on Linux (Better late than never): True and maybe even custom versions of wine (like elemental warriors fork and vanilla wine but vanilla wine cannot run complex apps tho)
5. Technologies like Electron make it easier for app availability: Controversial opinion but True

But... I wanna play Fortnite.

Me neither, if anything it's the other way around.

Let me give you 2 big reasons:

1. Linux does not work with the particular hardware or software you want or need to use.
2. It's a PITA to just do basic stuff.

I can't afford a broken system anytime and that's why i can't use linux. It breaks when you least expect.

I've been using Linux on my personal desktop system since 1997 and I think it's great. However as a user I fucking hate Linux so much. It is so frustrating to use, it always breaks in weird ways.

It can do anything because you can configure so much and you can even go into the code and make thing your own. But at the same time it can't do anything, there usually isn't a basic framework to do what most people want. Each user is just supposed to figure it out for themselves and put their system together in a way that makes sense. Even someone like me who can understand all this crap and can read, understand and contribute to the code, doesn't always want to do this. And most users wouldn't be able to do it anyways. Let me just spend 12 hours of my own free time to figure out something that isn't documented very well, with often wrong or outdated information, weird bugs with quirks and workaround and fun interactions with other bugs and workarounds I have on my system.

Just the other day I raged my head off because some kind of update broke my shit. There is this protocol that allows for the OS to tell monitors what brightness they need to be on. This is awesome for tablet/convertibles/laptops/all-in-ones, but for desktop systems I don't really see the use case. But it can't hurt the feature is there and you choose not to use it right? However it turned out this latest update had a nasty bug in it. At boot it somehow set all my monitors to 100% brightness, which was highly unpleasant and kept resetting it to 100% every boot. Not only that, it turned out my main monitor had too much clever for its own good. It has two modes of operating, one mode where the builtin OS inside the monitor does everything, it handles all the settings, profiles, color shit, protocols etc. The other way of operating is where the OS inside the computer does everything, they have a driver for Windows and some neat software that allows you to do everything in there. It has game recognition software and tweaks the monitor to work perfectly with that game etc. However me being a Linux user, they ofcourse don't have any of that, not even a driver etc. but I know this when I selected the monitor so I made sure it could handle everything inside the monitor as well, so I could use it to it's full potential on Linux. But this update broke all of that, because the monitor saw the OS was telling it to go to a certain brightness setting, so it assumed the OS inside the computer would be running the show and reverted back to some default safe profile until the software utility could tell it what to do. This made my monitor borderline unusable and flash bang me every reboot (which was a lot of times whilst I was trying to figure out how to fix it).

I put in a lot of hours and was able to somewhat consistently block the brightness control so the monitor could again be in charge. But not after the monitor was fed up with all my shit and just completely doing a factory reset, so I lost the personal profile I had been tweaking for years.

Now I know the monitor probably shouldn't work this way and it's bullshit the manufacturer doesn't create Linux drivers and makes sure the software utility is available on Linux. But on the other hand, this is just the way the world is. Blaming it on some huge corporation that doesn't give a shit and runs on cost/benefit calculations doesn't fix my monitor. In my experience this is a huge problem in the Linux community (me included), we tend to get mad at other entities that cause the problem as an excuse for not fixing said problem. Which is perfectly valid from a person point of view, but very frustrating from a user point of view.

Most people who went through what I went through with my monitor wouldn't be able to fix it and simply give up on using Linux forever. Or at least till they get a new monitor 5-10 years down the line.

2025 year of the minutes desktop 🤣

It'll never happen because Linux zealots write this crap when 100% seriousness.

I just started using W11 after reading up on how to install it without all the bloat and spyware, and how to configure it to my liking

25 years in and I still don't see a reason to switch to Linux