It doesn't bother me to turn on multilib support in a rootfs I only boot in a container just to run steam client and its games. Though I do have to reboot into a kernel w/32-bit support first which can be annoying.
Isn't that in by default on pretty much everything? I'm not aware of any distro shipping an x86 kernel with 32-bit support disabled, anyways. Are you intentionally building your own kernels and removing 32-bit compatibility? Seems like an easier thing to fix than having to reboot every time.... (Unless I've misremembered and that is a default, in which case please correct me because that throws it the other way)
My host is all 64-bit userland, it's just exceptions like Steam stuff that need 32-bit support (even the Steamworks/Steampipe developer side is annoying like this). So I boot into that kernel when doing those things, and keep those userspaces in separate containers which also get "booted" when needed.
Isn't that just because the system is less structured in general, so you've been beaten into submission?
After spending years on Linux pretty much everything on Windows feels like it's potentially spewing ick all over the place (registry, arbitrary folders, etc, not to mention the lack of reproducibility)!
The best at isolation has historically been macis, and then again you have plenty of packages installing to /Library, kernel extensions, uninstallers being placed in Applications/Utilities, MS updater being placed in /System and so on
Windows is moving towards apps living only in their own little containers, nice little isolated folders that they can't write outside of, with the exception of their reserved folder in AppData.
In contrast, *nix bunches executables up en-masse into a handful of folders.
It likely comes down largely to what you are used to.
Also, it is actually quite trivial bypassing UAC prompt in Windows. It simply gives a false sense of security.
Something as simple as SilentCleanup [1] still works to this day. This will bypass UAC with little effort.
Even worse, following that, it is also trivial to get NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM using Windows Management Instrumentation Event Subscription. [2]
I've done it as an exercise in Go out of all languages and it ended up fully undetected both on disk and during runtime.
So Windows simply provides a false sense of security. After all Microsoft themselves said [3]:
One important thing to know is that UAC
is not a security boundary. UAC helps people
be more secure, but it is not a cure all.
UAC helps most by being the prompt before
software is installed.
[1] https://enigma0x3.net/2016/07/22/bypassing-uac-on-windows-10...
[2] https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1084/
[3] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/e7/2009/02/05/update-on-uac...
Plus the other half which is the whole proprietary binary side of things. IMO, lack of transparency invites more bad behavior.
This is interesting to me because I spend 99.5% of my time on Linux (even for most of my gaming), but I still boot into a different OS when I want to use Steam, so I don't show up on the stat sheet. I wish I did. Two reasons I do this:
1. The Steam installation is kind of messy on my OS (Arch Linux). It involves a big client that doesn't integrate into the OS very well, requires a lot of 32 bit compatibility libraries that I wouldn't otherwise need, and leaves a bunch of large data files all over my home folder.
2. It simply feels weird and uncomfortable to run closed-source DRM-including software on Linux. I can't explain it any better than that, because it really is just a mental "purity" thing. I'd rather completely separate the "foreign" software that I have this instinctive distrust for onto a separate system entirely, where I already don't trust the OS.
I'm still grateful to Valve for the support, because it encourages developers to get their software to run on Linux, even if most of the games I play are DRM-free binaries purchased from the developer.