Something I did that helped make the jump was buying a separate drive to put linux on and removing my windows drive. It makes the act of switching back to windows take more effort, but didn’t remove the possibility altogether.

I also got an enclosure for my M.2 and can use the windows drive as a super fast thumb drive and use that to transfer the files from the windows drive that I care to keep on linux. (none of it is critical, not worth doing proper back ups)

All advice here seems to focus on linux, but I’d say rip that bandaid off first. Go cold turkey on roblox. That shit is the worst cancer to come out of something that was fun initially.

Not in four months to a year. Yesterday. Learn to control your impulses first and the rest will fall into place, whichever way you go.

Why wait? Dual boot, get cozy, still have the ability to go back to Windows if needed, find alternative apps, and soon enough, you won’t need the Windows partition :) Worked for my partner, my brother, and myself

You’ll never be wrong by making it dual boot - if you won’t need Windows, hooray, but if you will - it’s still there, always has been.

Start using it now in a VM. Linux has gotten very user friendly over the years but it’s still a completely different system with different design philosophies. Ease into it now and test the water with different distros

Honestly I’m considering just using Windows server 2022. I’ve got it running on my dedi and it’s great. I don’t see any reason not to just install it on my pc too.

Windows is dropping support for dual boot?

Dualboot definitely, don’t belive anything other than that, taking slow the only good way

When I left for Linux I had to give up League of Legends. I sucked it up, & after a month, I was fine without it & it was better since I knew it wouldn’t be worth the effort even trying to install it on Linux.

I would almost recommend GPU passthrough if you have a dual GPU system and can figure it out. It definitely takes a bit of tinkering, but I like the results: I now have both a Windows 10 (maybe will become 11, maybe 11 LTSC) and a Hackintosh VM. It’s not as good if you only have one graphics card, through. If you’re up for it, I used this tutorial. If it’s an AMD card, though, make sure to check my issue for any steps relating to that.

As for dual boot, get a second drive if you can. I find it helps me avoid a lot of the misery, although I very rarely actually boot up Windows anymore - just a VM if I really have to (which I do for MATLAB because my university is ridiculous and I figure if I’m going to use an evil programming language, I might as well use it in an isolated, evil environment).

You should set up dual boot now so you don’t get surprised by differences when support ends and you feel the need to switch to an ltsc sku or use Linux.

Don’t wait, prepare!

Keep a hold of windows for a little while so that if something critical comes up that you can’t figure out you have a fallback.

No better way to learn and get used to it than ripping off the bandage and being forced to deal with it. That’s what I did. Been Windows-free for ten years. If you still have a Windows partition around, it may be too tempting to just go back to it when things get a bit hairy.

As far as games, yeah, it sucks that I can’t play some games, but I’ve filled that time with more productive hobbies. I can program C and C++ now, self taught on Linux.

But the more people that jump ship, the more developers will target Linux, so it’s just a matter of time now before you can play anything again. It’s definitely a 1000x better environment now than when I switched back then.

Why wait? There’s no need for Windows, unless you’re running some super-specialized app. The new versions of Windows already have telemetry and privacy issues, so why just go with minimal security options that MS is selling you? You can do almost everything in Linux just as well, if not better, than Windows does at this point. Start with Linux Mint, which is the most Windows-y distribution and you should be golden.

Throwing out another idea: I upgraded an aging laptop and put mint on it and it’s my main right now, but I can get on the newer windows computer if I need to. I rarely need to now, though things will come up and its nice to have an out. Recently it was getting my printer working which I so rarely use. Didn’t have the patience, just needed the doc printed, flipped to windows.

It’s a little sad to me. I watched windows rise to its peak with windows 2000 and slowly fall. Been using it since 3.1, and had dos-only for a little while before that. It’s time to say goodbye. Been on and off with Linux since the early 2000s but this is my first real big push to use it outside of work or projects. Linux has come a long way from those days.

I’ve been a dual / triple / god knows how many OS booted since the 90’s.

Windows has gotten into bad habits lately - it’s not staying in its lane. Meaning it hasn’t respected other boot partitions for a long time, and recently there seems to be a lot of people having problems with windows nuking their linux installs.

My strong recommendation is to buy a second hard drive if you dual boot. Then windows can be “over there” - I’ve never had a problem dedicating ssds to the OS. My second recommendation is to do this now, why wait until you’re forced into something? You’ve got a year to learn Linux and get comfortable with it.