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While using Linux itself as my desktop OS isn't a problem for me (I'm quite comfy with Arch + KDE, also yes the obligatory I use arch btw :p), my problem so far which has always caused me to just go "f it, back to Windows I go" has been productivity. Basically what I'm missing is an equilavent to Visual Studio for my line of "work" (game modding and reverse engineering with IDA + x86dbg and working with the win32 API). Writing and especially debugging windows binaries with mingw + winedbg has been painful for me so far, also I simply couldn't find any IDE/editor I could get comfortable with (I've tried VS code, kdevelop, qt creator and vim so far). Contrary to that VS simply let's me create a new project with a few clicks which lets me immediately get to work, gives me premade Release / Debug configurations with (mostly) sane defaults, an intuitive GUI for managing compiler + linker settings, running and debugging with the click of a button with multiple views for resource consumption, local vars and what not, the ability to easily debug dump files, etc. etc.
Essentially in the time I tried to get basically anything done on any of the other toolsets I've probably already done some actual work on VS. It just works perfectly for my use case. The last time I've tried running Linux I actually went through the effort of setting up a KVM VM with dGPU pass through + intel gvt-g to drive the SPICE display (I have a laptop with an integrated + dedicated gpu and that seemed like the most intuitive setup) and - while it did work fairly well - the refresh rate was kind of off (even after patching QEMU to allow for more than the hardcoded 30Hz) and there was some weird stutter that I couldn't resolve (I've tried setting up virtio devices + installing the corresponding drivers, enabling hyper-v enlightments, changing the amount of vcpus, core pinning, static hugepages, etc. already, nothing helped in my case unfortunately). Those along with the realization there isn't much of a point of not simply running it in bare metal if I'm going to be in the VM most of the time anyways, brought me back to where I am right now: running Windows out of necessity / comfort. Not sure what to classify this wall of text as (a mixture of rant and search for suggestions?) but that's essentially the cause of the "dilemma" (nothing short of a first-world problem basically) I'm in right now: I want to run Linux as my desktop OS and regularly try to do so but as soon as I want to be productive I just have to reach out to Windows again. |