AI stuff works great on Linux (have personally run stable diffusion and large language models). Gaming is generally good but some games don't work on the platform (notably rainbow six, and valorant.)
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I've been using Linux as a daily driver for a couple decades. Home and work (before retirement). Unless your work has some fucked up Windows-only requirement, there is no reason Linux won't meet your needs.
I'd suggest Pop!_OS (Ubuntu-based) or Manjaro (Arch-based) as easy-to-pick-up distros with good gaming support out-of-the-box. Mint is nice for beginners as well but I have no idea if you need to tinker to get gaming working well.
I made the permanent switch from Windows four years ago. First to elementary OS but I found it severely lacking for gaming purposes and also for my power user needs. After a year of cursing and banging my head against the wall I switched to Pop!_OS for a couple of years. It was pretty great for everything I needed, including gaming. Except that I had constant problems with updating the proprietary Nvidia drivers to the point I once had to reinstall the entire OS to get my display to show up again. And also a lot of audio problems. It was a huge learning experience though!
I decided to try out Manjaro last summer and have been very happy with it since! I only booted back to Pop twice (just to check and copy some configs) before wiping its drive clean and never looking back. Pretty much everything just seems to work, especially gaming and the Nvidia drivers!
depending on your needs try WSL2 instead of dual booting. I've been linux or macos for quite a while in daily work as a programmer and kinda dig on WSL2 in Windows, particularly Win11 with the improved terminal. add Docker in the mix and there's nothing you can't do in that kind of environment that you'd be looking to do in a dedicated Linux boot...again dependin on what youre doing i guess.
Largely yes, but I have found WSL2 can kinda trip over itself a little bit when it tries to do serial stuff, sometimes.
USB device access and whatnot kind of works, but it can be a bit sketch.
Can’t have WSL without Windows Pro.
Would rather avoid spending $100 just to enable virtual machines.
WSL is available on Windows Home.
You're thinking about HyperV, not the "Virtual Machine Platform", the former require Pro+, and the latter is available on all (needs to be enabled), and is what enabled WSL, Docker, VirtualBox in HyperV.
Bad naming IMO and misused by many vendors.
Garuda Linux and then VanillaOS when Orchid is out and you're a little more familiar with the system. :)
You wont know for sure until you try. the main sticking point for gaming on linux is anti-cheat, so if you play a lot of games with that then you may run into some trouble. otherwise ProtonDB is your friend. Most games these days are pretty easy to get up and running.
A lot of AI tools are developed on linux anyway so you shouldn't encounter too many problems there.
Browsers are no problem at all. I recommend Firefox
libreoffice is also a good browser and you can brag that you have a light blue browser icon that no one else has