Steam is really the reason a lot of people are able to entertain a switch to Linux. It seems like mostly a lot of people are holding out on Windows 11 but planning a switch if they're finally forced.
Microsoft can't use the same plan they've always used on gamers, there's another option now. God bless Steam for being so reasonable, too. I regularly play Helldivers2 from Steam run from flatpak with a non-privileged user account, on Debian Unstable, without any anti-cheat problems. The world has changed for computer gamers and it's giving leverage with Microsoft.
Steam is great. It’s allowed me to use an M1 Max laptop for gaming instead of maintaining a separate Windows PC for gaming.
I don’t game often and Windows ensured I didn’t want to by throwing roadblocks every time I booted the machine.
At least every Mac and Linux machine I’ve owned has happily booted into a working OS no matter how long it sat. Windows tried to upgrade my machine to Windows 11 without my consent, when it already knew my machine didn’t support it. That was fun.
My neighbor got permanently locked out of her laptop because Microsoft somehow attached her dead husband’s email account to her local account despite him having never logged in on that machine. I wasn’t able to figure out how to fix it.
1. Windows 11, adverts everywhere, purposely difficult to turn off.
2. Windows 11 in work, it's slow, the menus are more annoying than in 10.
3. As a dotnet developer , pretty much everything I do is deployed on Linux. Also the developing tooling is now good enough on Linux.
4. Windows 11 won't stop badgering me for an online account.
5. My steam deck showed me that if I really want to play games on Linux it is really 100x easier than 15 years ago.
6. Windows front end is a mess of various different versions of the same menus.
After relying on windows for years due to amazing backwards compatibile hardware support, I've given up. It's a shit show.