I'm surprised that it was Windows 10 that made you switch. Windows 8 was my biggest disappointment.

Here's what I feel about each Windows release I've used much (1=low, 10=high):

    +-----------------+-------------+----------------+-----------+
    | Windows Version | Expectation | Disappointment | Usability |
    +-----------------+-------------+----------------+-----------+
    | 3.1             |           5 |              2 |         8 |
    | 3.11            |           7 |              3 |         6 |
    | NT 3.51         |           7 |              5 |         7 |
    | 95              |           6 |              3 |         7 |
    | NT 4.0          |           7 |              3 |         9 |
    | 98              |           7 |              2 |         8 |
    | ME              |           7 |              7 |         6 |
    | XP              |           8 |              3 |         8 |
    | Vista           |           5 |              5 |         4 |
    | 7               |           4 |              3 |         6 |
    | 8               |           6 |              8 |         2*|
    | 10              |           8 |              6 |         4 |
    +-----------------+-------------+----------------+-----------+

* - marred by experience w/Surface RT

From what I've observed, the biggest issues with Windows 10 are policy issues. Forced upgrades, forced telemetry, and deceptive/annoying attempts to get people to upgrade to it from Win7 and Win8.

You missed out on the joy that was Win2k. pretty much XP without the candy gloss. 9x interface, NT stability, and quite solid game support.

Most people skipped Windows 8 or tried it and quickly switched back to 7. And, because Windows 8 wasn't a hostile creature trying to take over your PC, it was pretty easy to choose not to use it. Windows 10 is pretty much just Window 8 excepted it's being forced on users.

NT 4.0 was gold, I wish they would release a version of W10 (Windows NT 9.0?) which has all the goodies and none of the dreck. That way I could test websites in their two entire web browsers without being marketed Office 365.

What is interesting about your numbering system is that your expectation continue to go up (in general) yet your disappointment also kept going up.

I would have expected that expectation would have started going down after each disappointment.

likewise, non-Linux gaming was always the problem for me, however now that VT-d works really very well, you can now virtualise games inside Windows at around 97% native speed.

it was initially a pain to get working, however over the past 12 months the tooling has improved a great deal, in virt-manager you can now assign your graphics cards/sound card/... with 1 or 2 clicks, and it simply works!

MS are free to spy on me playing Starcraft II in a VM, and I try to support Linux with my new purchases wherever possible.

so you use Debian as well? are there already good blog posts or similar on how to get VT-d working? If not, I think you could get quite a few hits with this, at least I would be quite interested once I get to build my next gaming PC. Otherwise I'm a mac user and I just despise not having a POSIX as the host system.

yes, Debian testing, stock everything

I might very well write a blog post, as quite a few people have asked

please do, I am curious especially about the video card (I thought that assigning a card to a vm meant the host system wouldn't be able to use it anymore, so how does it work)?

Besides games I'd love to be able to have a daw working well with asio and so on, as in virtualbox this does not work very well unfortunately (I guess realtime audio is not an easy problem to solve when vms are involved)

I have two video cards (a slightly older one for Linux).

audio was the hardest thing to get working smoothly... I have two soundcards, pass one through to Linux, and have a 5cm cable from the output into the line-in of the second card, which has hardware mixing so comes straight out the speakers with no pulseaudio involvement. needed a few registry hacks too (which I can't recall)

quite a few people report success with HDMI audio output, but my monitors are too old for this, so I haven't tried it

interesting, hope you write this up sometimes and that it makes the front page so I see it :) I'd be most interested in getting this to work with audio so I could have my DAW in linux indirectly, unfortunately virtualbox is not happy with realtime audio (if I go via pulseaudio it's bad, and assigning the usb audio card to it makes it crash)

I'm guessing you're using Intel graphics for the host system? (please write that article). I can help test to some extent as I have two VT-d capable systems.

I've tried this a few times, it normally works but never found a good solution for sharing my keyboard and mouse, how have you made that work?

I have one of those small keyboards with a touchpad for killing the VM (I mostly launch in snapshot mode so I don't need to shut it down :)

Another popular option is Synergy (https://github.com/symless/synergy) but I never used it.

synergy works out of the box, just need to remember that most games require the "lock to screen" mode (which I have bound to F12)

Hm, I did try Synergy before but I found the latency was an issue, I didn't really change the config though, is there something to be done to improve it?

It's the reason I stopped dual booting and went full Manjaro.

The major benefit of switching from a proprietary operating system to a free operating system is the communities ability to investigate a problem and freely document how to fix it. It could be described as a decentralized troubleshooting process as it has no single point of failure and is free for all to contribute to.

The freedom these operating systems give us is something I think should be emphasised more as people tend to focus on the technical challenge.

My personal computers are on Windows 7, using Microsoft OS since Dos 6.22. At work & my server I've been using Ubuntu for years.

I was just waiting to see how Windows 10 would evolve, because I don't really want to use Linux at home but it seems that's the way I will have to go.

Just wait a bit more and things will sort out.

I am on MS OSes since MS-DOS 3.3. So far only skipped MS-DOS 4, Windows ME and Vista.

A week in to Xubuntu myself. It's such a pleasure being in control again.

Interestingly, my friends that started hating Windows 10 went back to 7.

Since Windows 7 I happen to only use GNU/Linux on my travel netbook and even got back to doing mostly .NET projects.

Win 7 made me switch permanently. I got tired of the ever slower boot process despite not installing anything.

What made you chose the Debian distribution of GNU/Linux?

Will this finally be the year of the Linux desktop? Nope.

The year of Linux on the desktop was around 2010. The trouble is, I'm still waiting for the year of Linux on the laptop.

Yeah, I was just joking really. (Although it's true, if by 'year of the linux desktop' you mean 'year it gets >10% marketshare')

My NAS runs CentOS and I have Arch/Ubuntu on my home pc's, but I still dual boot Windows on one because gaming.

The 'I wonder who else will switch to Debian 8 like me' just struck me as comical.

I would be extremely surprised if MS lost any meaningful amount of marketshare from Win10, especially to linux distros.

I have a cheap chromebook with Crouton and I'm very happy for the price. Cheap, light and I get about 10 hours of battery life.

> The trouble is, I'm still waiting for the year of Linux on the laptop.

Do Chromebooks count?

Ubuntu on a Dell Latitude here. Windows runs in Virtualbox. It just works.

How is the default battery life? I had to use pretty aggressive tlp settings to get within 50% of what windows gets on an XPS out of the box.