A few reasons:

  * License cost
  * HDD / SSD storage space
  * OS performance
  * They might not agree with the EULA
  * Or simply because they just don't don't like Windows.

The real question is now that the web has gotten everyone used to the idea of applications being platform agnostic, why would anyone want to go back to a Windows lock in?

All correct. Also, I booted into Windows on Saturday to play a game, it hadn't been booted in months, so I hat to wait for a forced SP install and Windows wiped out Grub. Every time I boot back into Windows it kills Grub and I have to fix it again. Not only did I lose all my gaming time to the updates, I lost extra time fixing my bootloader because of Windows' aggressive BS. The sooner I can get it gone the better and I'll free up an entire SSD for games.

I just have two hard drives for this reason, super super annoying.

A big one is not having to reboot in to the other OS to do stuff.

On the other hand, having easy (just a click away instead of having to reboot) access to games requires greater discipline, in order to avoid procrastinating. :)

I dual booted for a while but I found myself using Windows so infrequently that whenever I booted it up I'd wind up spending hours updating everything. In the end I decided it was far too much hassle.

Incidentally my "game time" these days is much more likely to be on my 486 PC, Atari 800 or Dreamcast. I don't have much time to game so being able to jump in immediately and not be interrupted trumps the latest-and-greatest blingy graphics any day.

Completely agree with the first paragraph. I haven't booted Win 10 in over a year now.

A large part of my "game time" is on emulated PS2, so I guess I'm way younger than you. :)

This is exactly why I'm into retro gaming as well

We don't like being spied on.

I don't want to use Windows ever again in my life (of course I'm talking about the current software made by the current software company, not the name Windows, this isn't a religious issue).

Also, rebooting takes ages. My Linux boot time might be measured in seconds, but I'm always in the middle of some kind of work and I use my running system to maintain continuity. It's a major pain in the arse to reboot, so I do it rarely.

I don't have to close my browser tabs.

This...

It takes me a good 20m to reboot. 5m for the actual reboot and 15m to check to see if I'll lose any work.

Also - I tend to multitask. Dip into games, dip into work, browsing etc. It's not a concerted change of mode so closing one side of my mind down for a single purpose just doesn't work for me.

This this this. Rebooting is a-ok if all you use the computer for is games. But then you don't need to reboot because you're in Windows already.

If you use the computer for multiple purposes, rebooting to play a game will disrupt your environment way too much.

While I do dual boot, I have booted Windows like 2 times this year. The rest, I played ported games. There are a lot of them.

Because they don't want to use Windows, period.

You could just virtualize it, dual-booting isn’t even needed. Then create private NAT and only whitelist certain ports and traffic. Hardware assisted virtualization is actually faster in certain cases and workloads than native these days.

If you don't want to use it (many reasons), virtualizing or dualbooting doesn't really make a difference.

You make it sound as if it is trivial to configure the GPU passthrough.

Also, you'll need two graphics adapters for this.

It's not that hard to setup these days honestly, I think the requirement of having 2 GPUs is a turnoff for a lot of people though.

And I think it's been catching on a lot more now that both Intel offers VT-d standard in most of it's chips. So does AMD with its SVM equivalent.

I like this approach Valve is taking better than resorting to VMs though. I'll probably continue to use my GPU passthrough setup for now but when the game compatibility on this gets better I'll likely switch.

So an intel CPU + discrete GPU fills the requirement?

Also novidia is known to block driver installs from a VM because “you should be using a professional GPU for that” but there are ways to trick the installer.

AMD has no such problems.

Correct, it is way easier to setup with kvm. Would highly recommend AMD cards for this over nVidia.

I'm using VMs but not for gaming, just running Linux guests on Linux host. virgl works pretty well now for that purpose. But what's really missing is SR-IOV. AMD so far didn't want to support it in regular cards.

Setup can still be a bit annoying.

If I imagine the average PC gamer, I don't think they would be able to troubleshoot any problems. Once you get into setting up storage pools (libvirt) or having to edit the libvirt XML file (want to have host native Audio?) and of course installing all those drivers for optimal performance (digging up the correct CD image and mounting it is not trivial either.

Isn't the 2 GPU requirement just for running native graphics concurrently on both systems? You can still use the Linux host remotely over the network.

edit: here's a receipe: https://github.com/joeknock90/Single-GPU-Passthrough

The other issue going down the HVM route is the number of multiplayer platforms e.g. Steam that ban users running inside of a hypervisor[1]. From their perspective it masks the existence of things like memory manipulation tools and other cheating devices.

[1] - https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/9/1355103931983...

My laptop came with Windows pre-loaded on the original SSD. No installation medium obviously, other than the recovery partition. I'm curious if it even loads if I tell Virtualbox to load it from that drive, given that the hardware it presents in a virtualized system is significantly different from the actual laptop hardware.

got any tips for a starting point on that (hardware assisted virtualization)? I'd be super interested.

what host os, guest os, virtualization stack (vmware??), video card combo is working for you?

Cheers.

Some games (mostly older ones) run faster (higher fps) on Linux via Wine, compared to when they run natively on windows.

I have my dual boot on 2 separate SSDs and personally find it nice to keep gaming and research separate; there is no temptation to game during the week this way. As an aside, curious why some of these reboot times take so long.

Windows costs money.

windows start time is too long

I can reboot my Windows 10 desktop in a few second. The only reason I put my desktop to sleep is that I don't trust the hibernation to maintain my application state...

Since Windows 8, Windows uses a form of hibernation internally. When there's no updates to install, it doesn't actually shut down in the classic sense. Instead, it closes any applications, then hibernates the OS. So, it writes the contents of the RAM to the hard drive, then it powers off.

When it's being powered on again, it just loads that state from the hard drive, rather than running a boot process, which results in significantly better boot times. It however also has drawbacks. It can cause instabilities and it leaves the hard drive in some unworkable state.

The latter is why most people will want to turn this feature off when dual booting. If you don't turn it off and you only have one hard drive with partitions for each OS, you're actually not going to be able to boot Linux (or install it in the first place).

If you have physically separate hard drives, you're not going to be able to access files on your Windows drive, which if it's a gaming-only system might not be as important, but otherwise is still kind of handy.

I have not disabled the fast boot options in Windows and yet I am still able to mount my NTFS formatted boot drive in my Linux install. The existence of a hibernate file does not mean the disk is somehow unworkable.