Technology

with no reason to regret removing Windows.

I've been using Linux on my desktop since the 1990s. I'm certainly not opposed to people using Linux on their desktop. But I can definitely think of things, even in 2024, that someone might want Windows for.

• If you go and buy a piece of hardware from a vendor, even really obscure stuff, there will almost certainly be a Windows driver. These days, Linux support is pretty common, and stuff like USB device classes providing a standard interface for a lot of hardware deals with a lot of that. But if I were getting something weird like, oh, one of those projectors that displays 3D images on mist, I'd be more-cautious. VR headsets are probably one of the more-prominent recent examples. Yeah, you can get a VR headset for Linux, but not all of the VR headsets out there are Linux-compatible.

• Maybe a more-prominent issue -- while it's rare for hardware to not work, it's more-common for some functionality not to be available. tries to think of an example Okay, here's one. I have a flightstick and throttle from CH from some years back. These are standard ol' USB Human Interface Devices. Their axes and buttons are detected, and I can use them just fine. But they also have a little button on both their throttle and joystick that -- besides acting as a button -- cycles a series of one illuminated LED through three LEDs, green,yellow,red. I believe that it's intended to switch between different "profiles" -- so, like, say you're just flying along, you have one set of controls, but then you enter into combat in some flight system, you can toggle to the "yellow" profile by tapping a button. Whatever software CH ships to handle that on Windows isn't shipped for Linux. Okay, you could probably set something similar up for Linux if you've the time and technical chops, and maybe there's a way to do it for Steam games using Steam Input. But there isn't gonna be software provided to do it out-of-the-box on Linux, whereas there is on Windows.

• There are still a few pieces of software that you can't run. If you specifically need or really want to run something, that may be a problem. There are very few games on Steam that I can't run, but one happens to be Command: Modern Operations, which suffers from both relying on 3d hardware -- so not being VM-friendly -- and not having anyone manage to get it working. There are other military simulation games, but no real direct alternatives. Now, I can live without that software package, though I sure would like to run it, but there may users that don't have that kind of flexibility.

• There's also some software that you can make use of on a machine running Linux, but need to run in a Windows VM. That...works, but is also kind of annoying. A good example might be something like Solidworks, which doesn't support Linux. There are engineers out there who are going to need to use Solidworks to do their work. I understand that you can run it in a VM -- and there's sufficient demand that apparently the company certifies VM environments with a dedicated GPU for pass-through use with the VM but that's kind of annoying, if you're someone whose work revolves around the package.