>>512505689 (OP)I stayed on Linux in the late 2000s after about 5 years of dual booting when I had a powerful enough machine that could do virtualisation for the really old software that just was a massive pain to work with wine.
Gaming, while it's gotten better thanks for Valve, I just see that as a massive time sink and pretty much every person I know that's late 30s and early 40s that still plays them for hours every week have been massive failures. All childless, stuck in jobs they hate, often having other vices like alcohol or weed and absolutely no ambition, just wanting to complain about their situations and escape rather than do anything to address it.
When I just said fuck this, gave up other things like porn or going out to get drunk and chase women, I found I had way more time on my hands to actually do things I wanted. For the first time in years I actually got things done that I'd been putting off for many years and I turned my life around.
I see people use something like Windows 11, with its ads baked in to the OS and constant popups it's like, why would you subject yourself to this Pajeet shit? Yeah Linux can have it's issues but if you just go for some mainstream distro like Kubuntu you won't have any major issues. And I can say that after trying practically every distro and DE. It's not that I don't think things like rolling release or tiling window managers aren't cool. I still do, but when you get older you start to ask yourself is it really worth my time fiddling with this thing now it's broken? In my 20s, I thought yes, because I was at least learning things every time I fixed something.
>>512506640Don't connect that shit to the internet. The source code of XP was also leaked, there may be versions of it that people are maintaining (so that they fix issues or get newer things to work). There are also things like ReactOS which aims to be compatible with Windows.