Linux

That comes with its own risks because Windows has been known to destroy dual boot setups when doing updates. Not always, but it can happen and it's burnt people.

Dual booting also makes it harder when you decide to get rid of windows fully, because you might yourself accidentally screw your bootloader as part of removing windows.

The option I would personally recommend if you are unsure is to disconnect your windows hard drive, keep it safe, and install Linux on a separate drive. Then you can always drive swap back if you need and you know everything is safe.

You can even put the windows drive back in after installing Linux, and then just use your BIOS boot drive selector to switch where you are booting from. Each drive has it's own boot record in that case, so there's less risk of any accidents.

My main gaming rig is my last system not running Linux right now, I've been migrating my stuff over on my other systems for a couple months now (I keep getting distracted lol)

But not that I've got alts for the software I normally use on my main rig it's finally time, 2 months ahead of schedule.

The market share of Steam Decks has been declining among Steam Linux users for at least over a year. Steam Deck users were 42% of Steam Linux users in April '24, and this year's July it's only 28%.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

0.3% overall. There might be half a million new Linux gamers on steam, but there's still hundreds of millions of PC gamers using Windows.

You can arrange the numbers how you want, the fact is that this is still a pretty small shift in the overall PC gamer landscape. I promise you, that's how any larger developer sees it. Their pool of PC gamers shifted by a fraction of a percent. A good chunk of those that they "lost" as potential customers, probably wouldn't have bought their games in the first place.

The demographic overlap for large studios of people who are intentionally using Linux for gaming, and people that are interested in their game, doesn't overlap much, if at all, I bet. Until we get their key demographic switching over in large enough quantities to threaten their profits, the majority of the industry won't budge from their windows centric views.

Look. I don't hate Linux. Quite the opposite in fact. I'm rooting for these stats to move in and significant amount. I feel that's an inevitable shift that will happen and until we do, we'll keep getting these articles, describing a fraction of a percent move in the overall numbers as if it's a huge culture shift for how people are playing games.

If you haven't seen it, maybe you should watch field of dreams, becasuse the main tag line of the movie "if you build it, they will come" definitely applies here. The larger PC gaming community, there is a statistically significant number of indie devs and indie studios that support Linux as a platform, even if it's just the steam deck they're building for.... Those studios just are not the biggest players in terms of revenue/sales... But they're the ones building "it". This is slowly but surely fueling the fires that will eventually burn down Microsoft's dominance in the gaming space. It's been a war that's been waged for literal decades, since before steam was a thing.

There will come a day when we will hit critical mass and the large studios will be forced to either accept that their user base is shrinking because they don't support Linux. That day is not today. We will need to see much more movement than a few percent difference before that happens. This isn't even a few percent. This is a fraction of a percent of the total.

So forgive me if I'm not excited by any of this. It's movement in the right direction, but it's utterly meaningless to the companies that could actually shift the industry to Linux on a large scale.

I think OP is referring to the percentage, not functionality. Windows, especially the office suites / GUIs are micht more refined. Someone somewhere pointed out at some point in time that backend development is often open source because developers are dedicated to the cause and the function. Designers, on the other hand, not so much (maybe they need payment because their main job pays less... I don't know.

In the end, the user uses the front-end, not the backend. And unless money flows into front-end development, for example, by a growing market of companies who want to switch away from office 365 for functional and financial reasons, we won't see front-ends which are attractive enough for people to switch to Linux for daily/ work related tasks.