Linux is the best thing. I´m using it on the desktop as my daily desktop driver.
I only use Windows for gaming and also when I need exact MS Office compatibility.
I use Linux for all other use cases.

For office suites, I use Libre Office (currently at 7.1.2), which is great.

I have a laptop in dual boot, managed by GRUB.

The bad part about this is the absolutely crappy status of nVidia drivers, which prompts me to buy devices with Intel onboard graphics, but all the latest games have abysmal optimization and cannot run on this chipset. Which sucks, but anyway, it seems like gaming studio don´t want my money, or those of millions of Intel onboard graphic users for that matter...

I get you at least.
Still, you can always try USB live boots of a few distros to think on for the future should the firewall you want eventually appear?
(also handy should everything else go to hell with your pc).

Win 10 isn't a bad operating system. It gets a bad rap here from the elitist crowd that doesn't want to switch, but ultimately, it's pretty good. Fast, compatible, and with a little bit of knowhow (and/or Googling) fairly configurable to protect your privacy. I mean, it has its problems, but I like it more than Linux Mint, and I run and play around on both pretty extensively. As for other distros, I don't really have any recent experience with them. But Mint is pretty awesome, and Win 10 is too.

strange how it is always getting better and never reaches windows :P

every year: the next year is linux year , and somehow it isnt :D

Personally, I think Microsoft does not care about its customers, moreover they keep insulting their intelligence, time and time again. In the gaming world they have an equivalent, Bethesda. The irony here, given the recent acquisition of ZeniMax/Bethesda by Microsoft. As they say, birds of a feather flock together... Maybe the next version of Windows will offer 16 times the detail and infinite quests for fixing whatever it might throw at you.

A good OS should not require the user to configure something as basic as privacy settings, that should be a default. A proper OS will have the interest of the user at heart. Sure, there are programs and scripts out there that can help, but there is only so much they can do. Whenever I think of Windows 10, a leaky boat comes to mind. There is no such thing as privacy or user control in this OS, those concepts are long gone. Such are the times...
Believe me, I would've liked this to be a proper, user-centric operating system. Alas, it was never built with that in mind.

Objectivity comes from facts and actions. Given Microsoft's actions, the actual state of the OS, the criticism they got, their slow reaction or lack thereof when it comes to fixing their own product and many other factors that I won't mention here, I'd say Windows 10 is poor at best.

Don't take it the wrong way, but I found it funny you mentioned Google and privacy in the same sentence.

ofc it can be good if you dont want to use it for anything , just stare at it
then probably linux is the best os for that
you can handtailor anything

Like Bethesda... ah if only other successful companies wouldn't act exactly the same way.
What's the diff between fallout 76 and cyberpunk release? Both were a buggy half made mess, like they are made by the same company. Yet you are here on Gog their sis company. Look at the forum how much Gog cares about its users especially linux users. You don't even get a linux client for Galaxy. There are plenty of topics about it. So why are you keeping using it?

A good OS is default to what ? To what you would set it up? Don't you think that is different from others?
Basically you want an os to be tailored for yourself while you are clearly a minority in the user base. Makes not much sense if you think it through.

What are those Microsoft actions?
The thing is most people don't care for privacy as much as you do.
Why should they when they gladly post their own info to FB themselves?
I can't see how an OS set default to the majority of people is bad.

The actual state of win10 is, it is way more used than linux, and there are plenty of reasons why.
And you say like linux had no problems at all. Yet there is nvidia issues and a lot of other issues too. Why dont linux quickly fixes their own product?

I don't know if it is "broken". The instructions just seemed more complicated than in Ubuntu, and there were lots of warnings that so many things can go wrong. So I just said "Ok forget it then", not even trying it.

First I made the wrong assumption that it would go similarly as in Ubuntu (as it is an Ubuntu derivative), but the first hint of this not being the case was that there was no do-release-upgrade command. :) I guess it is logical it is not necessarily the same process as in Ubuntu, maybe I had just become too comfortable thinking Linux Mint being "just like" Ubuntu.

Maybe I'll try the Mint release upgrade on a virtual machine first, maybe it goes fine and my fears were unnecessary... On my work (Windows 10) laptop, I have Mint 19.3 running in VirtualBox, so I can just take a snapshot of that virtual machine and easily revert back to 19.3 in case the release upgrade goes south.

I am here because I still want to support DRM-free gaming, offline installers and all that. Not interested in Galaxy, since I am able to manage my collection just fine without the need of a client. So I'm okay, on both Windows and Linux.
The fact they don't support Galaxy for Linux or that the forums are in this state, that's completely their doing. Much has been said along the years, yet here we are in 2021. Same ol', same ol'.

Do explain how am I a minority in the user base. You mean by expecting a proper product, not something half-baked?
Computing should be a personal experience, unique to every user, and for that there has to be a solid base to start from. Microsoft strays more and more away from that.

I won't go into details here about Microsoft's actions. You can always learn by yourself.
I am well aware that many people do not care about privacy. Concerning, to say the least, waiving a basic right, but to each their own. Windows 10, as it is set by default, is pure garbage. Many can attest to that.

And regarding Linux, whenever did I mention it has no problems at all? There is no such thing as perfection in the first place. Things can always improve, as is the case with everything.
When it comes to Nvidia, considering they use proprietary drivers, closed-source, wouldn't you say that's their job? Were they to offer an option to look into the code, that would be something else.
Indeed, Windows is more used, as it requires little to no savviness, which is exactly the point. Why would you want to learn and delve into the unknown when "it just works"?

At the end of the day, use what's best for you and respect the choices of others. Read, listen and learn, understand not everything is as it might seem. Always consider having options, don't just get stuck with something.

Many of the GOG games don't work right on Windows 10 either. People have even reported that some Windows 10 updates have broken games that earlier worked in Windows 10 (off the top of my head, the in-game videos of Two Worlds stopped working after Microsoft, in one of their Windows 10 updates, stopped supporting the video decoder that the game uses).

That's life, I guess. Sometimes things may get broken with updates.

LOL.

The shoe is on the other foot mate.

You truly are deluded and obnoxious, and truly deserve the dislike that many have for you here ... such a smartarse.

Have a good life.

Some use cases where I see myself (or others) using dualboot, having Windows and Linux side by side:

1. Your PC has an old Windows that is not supported my MS anymore, hence it is not secure to go online with it or use for serious stuff like online banking etc. Maybe you don't want to pay for a Windows 10 license to upgrade its Windows to 10, or you feel it wouldn't even work that well with Windows 10, e.g. it has too little RAM for comfortable Windows 10 use, or there are no Windows 10 drivers for some of its hardware (for some reason I've quite often seen e.g. audio and/or wifi adapter stop working, when I've installed a new Windows release on an older PC).

Still, you want to keep that Windows installation intact because that machine works great for some of your older games (including GOG games; I have many GOG games that work much better on Windows 7, than Windows 10; let alone older retail games which fail on Windows 10 or even 7 due to their copy protection; one such game being "Peter Jackson's King Kong" game that works only in Windows XP due to its CD copy protection).

For me this is the most common situation. I have an old PC (desktop or quite often a laptop) that has e.g. Windows XP or Windows 7 running on it and I hesitate to upgrade them to Windows 10 for reasons mentioned above. So, I cut off internet connectivity for Windows on that machine, and install Linux on the side. Then that PC can still go online with Linux, while its Windows is used only for playing some of those (usually older) games.

2. Like the OP in this thread, you are just curious about Linux, and want to see how it works, including gaming. But you don't want to give up on Windows, at least not quite yet.

If it wasn't for gaming, running Linux in a virtual machine (e.g with VirtualBox) is probably the best idea for curious people, as it is easy to set up and also to get rid of, even testing lots of different Linux distros, and hey why not even FreeBSD if you want to go really crazy (that is what I've done recently).

But virtual machines are not suitable to test how Linux would work for gaming, on your PC. For that, dual-boot is a good option.

Maybe other reasons too, I'll add to this...

Anyway, you do have a point that I haven't gotten to install (dual-boot) Linux e.g. on my work laptop which has Windows 10. I don't see much benefit in doing that; I have other PCs where I am running Linux, and I am also running Linux on that Windows laptop as a virtual machine in VirtualBox. That actually becomes quite handy at work many times, when I quickly want to check something with e.g. curl or wget in Linux (I have absolutely no idea what would be the equivalents for those in Windows, I'm so used to doing many such things and checkups on Linux).

i have linux manjaro on a separate ssd here just for testing it out
and i used plenty of vm-s too
wsl2 is pretty good in win10 for a linux terminal , you should try it out

Yeah I've read about that ("Windows subsystem with Linux"), but the idea just sounds... icky. Not sure what MS is trying to achieve with it.

Since I am already running VirtualBox with a couple different Linux distros (and recently also FreeBSD to become more familiar with it and OpenZFS), I just rather do my "Linux stuff" there on this Windows laptop, instead of going with Microsoft's shenanigans.

Out of curiosity, what DE do you use for Manjaro and how much RAM does it take to run usually?