My new year’s resolution is getting rid of all my Windows dependencies and eventually deleting my Windows partition if I‘m 100% successful.
I’d like to use this thread to document interesting tidbits I learn along the way and talk in general about ways to run stuff that’s supposed to run on windows on other OSs.
You will definitely have a better user experience running stuff in Wine as opposed to virtualizing a Windows guest from a Linux host (much worse than virtualizing a linux guest on a linux host), IO performance sticks out particularly IMHO due to the vastly different file systems being used by linux and windows.
I’d do both. Run apps in Wine and spin up a virtual machine only if you really need it.
What a great idea! I do all of my gaming except VR flight sims on Linux already, and was planning to check out how to run DCS in VR on Linux soon after the simpit is somewhat finished.
But 2 things made me uncertain about that:
I did get my Canon laser printer to work with Linux yesterday so that’s one thing to tick off the list. Canon Printer Setup Utility GUI appeared in my apps list, probably from my previous failed attempt to set it up through CLI. The GUI worked though
Does your printer come without a print server? If not, then the easiest thing would IMHO be to ditch any apps and use it as a network printer via CUPS.
I’m in the same boat.
If everything goes right my new rig (soon hopefully) will have no Windows partition either.
The biggest problem seems to be VR, probably not going to work. But I don’t care about it that much anymore.
Another one from the top of my head are games that use Kernel level security, like all EA multi-player games. Sadly it isn’t only the MP that is affected, EA WRC for example doesn’t run on Linux (including Steam Deck) anymore since they implemented that crap. This one might be hard to dodge but at least it isn’t in many games (yet).
MSFS 2024 is another problem, last time I checked it had a lot of issues on Linux but looked solvable.
I still haven’t settled on a Linux distribution but to avoid the amount of work that usually goes into Arch configurations (I am rusty, only did it once years ago and it sucked) I’ll probably start off with Mint and develop from there. It has a huge load of software to choose from.
For gaming I’ll start off with Steam+Proton, Bottles, Wine and go from there. Lutris might be worth trying.
Office is LibreOffice
Music stuff I’ll do with Reaper
Drawing in Inkscape, pixel graphics with Gimp.
@Freak, if you can’t get the Canon working over the network Epson Workforce printers work with just about anything, over the network.
As a printer I use my old HP Officejet network printer (of course not with HP ink, I am not rich) and it runs fine with standard drivers. Better than on windows actually. I don’t print much though.
…and I think I haven’t tried the scanner yet.
I usually go Gog before Steam and Lutris looks great for that. Currently dling Stalker 2…
As for old games:
ScummVM and DosBox run fine for dos things, and wine handles even old win3.1 and win95 stuff that doesn’t run well (or at all) on modern windows just fine as far as I could see.
If you need a software for gaming mice, Piper seems to do the trick.
OpenRGB works for all the flashy RGB stuff if you are into that.
Linux recognizes gaming hardware surprisingly well. PS3 and PS4 controllers work out of the box for example. Saitek panels I haven’t tried yet, but are reported to work. Same for most joysticks apparently, but I haven’t tried that either since my current Linux PCs are all old hardware that cammot run any current games.
There‘s so many projects right now for Linux gaming.
Bazzite
CachyOS
Gamescope
Endless list. So many things. So little time. 
Addendum: AI summary
While both distributions focus on gaming, they target different segments:
The choice between these distributions would depend on your specific hardware, gaming preferences, and willingness to tinker with system settings.
No apps, no server, just a simple very cheap used Canon laser printer with a USB connector and shitty drivers.
Good idea to set it up as a network printer: I still have a RasPi in storage that I could use
EDIT: on second thought, it’s not that easy because it requires a button press to turn it on.
I have CachyOS in a vm and it feels very snappy. I just don’t trust it enough to use it as daily driver, as sometimes I also need to use my gaming rig for work related stuff.
I used Linux for 10+ years on my personal “hobby” PC. Dual boot with Windows, for convenience. Up until 3 years ago, I did everything outside work on Linux. Very comfortable and customizable environment, for me. Never used Linux for gaming, though, outside some GoG titles in DOSBox.
My lack of good experiences toward Win10 and Win11 over the past couple years, I have replaced my aging Windows PCs with Mac Minis (M series). All I have left is my one Win10 gaming computer, and my old (old) Linux fileserver.
This choice came from my needing to move to a newer work desktop, and my tools aren’t Linux compatible.
I’ve been running Pop!_OS on my gaming machine, and tried too many other distributions on my laptop. The plug and play experience for the Nvidia card was the selling point for me, and being able to use standard Ubuntu solutions for most things.
Nowadays though, it’s getting long in the tooth, being based on Ubuntu 22.04 (2022). The next version is a bit delayed and will shake things up with a brand new super responsive Desktop Environment. That will only do Wayland though so it won’t be great for compatibility.
Now I’d recommend Linux Mint if you want stability and like having the option to google “how to do X in Ubuntu”, and Bazzite for a more gaming-focused plug and play experience that supports the latest hardware.
Bazzite also comes with a “Steam Deck style” Gamescope session.
It’s an interesting topic, to get rid of Windows. I’m kind of on the reverse path, though. After being thrown into SunOS back in the early 90ies, I used Linux pretty much from the get go as dual boot. Slackware and all that back in the day. I’ve participated quite actively in the Open Source community, and organized the conference part of LinuxTag in Germany, back from 98 to 2003. After a while I joined Canonical and supported Ubuntu in various roles. Back then I spent naturally all my professional time on Ubuntu, with a Windows partition for gaming. But even during this timeframe from 2006 to 2012 I never made the transition fully - lock-in due to gaming was inevitable.
Since then I moved mostly to Mac OS X as my work environment, and use Windows for gaming. What happened to the dual boot? Around 2015/2016 I finally got rid of it and prefer nowadays to run WSL with Ubuntu for my command line foo. Not that the Linux desktops are that bad, but then, the years when ‘Linux arrives on the desktop’ got old quickly.
Now, as in the past, I’m still locked into a Windows environment for the gaming stuff that I care about. Be it DCS, Blender with EDM and arma3 plugins, Substance Painter, I feel quite comfy using these on Windows. The alternative to use proton/wine/crossover for running these under any Linux distro - too much of a hassle nowadays for me.
Nevertheless, good luck with the transition, sobek!
I don’t think any of us are worried about gaming, except perhaps for getting the most out of our hardware, but this whole Copilot/Recall mess does worry you when you occasionally have to handle personally identifying information (or whatever the legal term is in your jurisdiction).
I really liked Win10, I migrated all our WinXP machines to it pretty quickly (the Win7 machine went to 8.1 IIRC, but what was because of needing a Media Center app to do what we needed it to do).
Win11? It’s only caused problems for me since migrating. I’ve had to find ways to stop it automatically updating to a version that removes features I use, and every update now I’m scouring the patch notes to see how it’s going to try to spy on me…
This is all very interesting to the semi-educated layman. i.e. someone who can build a PC from parts and install an OS… basically, if it is plug-n-play I am OK.
I have already decided that I will not be migrating to Win11, purely because of their business model, but apart from learning some Unix commands about 10 years ago so I could air-gap files that the admins weren’t allowed to see I have zero experience or familiarity with Linux/Unix.
I guess I am about to learn because Win10 end of life will coincide with my next PC build and at this stage what I will be doing is running Win10 on the new (dedicated to games) rig, working on the principle that if I have what I need backed up and take sensible precautions it won’t matter if that gets ‘hacked’.
The current PC will be repurposed with some flavour of Linux (mint is looking like the easiest for now) for everything else: banking, browsing, email, etc.
I guess I will be bombarding all you Linux nerds with a lot of questions in about 10 months 
I understand your predicament, but there are some things you should consider:
Backups (stored in a secure place, so not on the same machine) can help you against loss of data. They can not help you against an attacker wanting to use your data. Getting your steam account taken over by a malicious actor can be a gigantic PITA (back in the days of SC2 I had my battlenet account stolen, mostly through my own stupidity, but the experience was less than ideal).
You will be gaming on borrowed time. GPU & other device drivers will at some point no longer be available for your system, same as stuff that some games depend on to run (dotnet and all that jazz).
I think your overall approach is sensible, but you would be better served by running win11 on your gaming rig or ditching windows alltogether. The emulation tools in Steam for Linux are very mature, with the caveat that they dont work equally well for all games.
HTH. Also there is very good documentation for just about anything on the net (looking at you, Arch wiki).
Thanks for that. I understand the difference between loss of data and compromised account, and was alluding to the difference between inconvenient vs. catastrophic (i.e. the difference between having my Steam account taken over vs. my bank account).
I have to admit I hadn’t really considered drivers and hardware support. I guess come October it will be a case of how much of my Steam library will run (adequately) under Linux 
I am certainly not going to be paying for Win11 just so I can be the product.
Maybe related. I used Chris Titus Tech’s de-bloater tool to do this but here’s a YT for Windows 11 to turn off Copilot and Recall. Timestamped to get past the blah, blah, blah…
There are a few out there on this too.
Been running it this way for a few weeks and no issues.