To be clear, my desktop works fine on Windows 11. But the general ratio of cool new features to egregious bullshit is low. I do not want to talk to my computer<\/a>. I do not want to use OneDrive. I\u2019m sure as hell not going to use Recall<\/a>. I am tired of Windows trying to get me to use Edge, Edge trying to get me to use Bing, and everything trying to get me to use Copilot<\/a>. I paid for an Office 365 subscription so I could edit Excel files. Then Office 365 turned into Copilot 365, and I tried to use it to open a Word document and it didn\u2019t know how.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10<\/a>, including security updates, forcing people to buy new hardware or live with the risks. It\u2019s disabling workarounds that let you set up Windows 11 with a local account<\/a> or with older hardware. It\u2019s turning Xboxes into PCs and PCs into upsells for its other businesses. Just this week, the company announced that it\u2019s putting AI agents in the taskbar<\/a> to turn Windows into a \u201ccanvas for AI.\u201d I do not think Windows is going to be a better operating system in a year, so it feels like a good time to try Linux again.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not normally one to change frogs midstream, but the water sure is getting hot.<\/p>\n Coming soon to a taskbar near you! But not near me. Image: Microsoft<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to say I know what I\u2019m doing. I\u2019ve used Macs for a decade for work, and I dabbled in Ubuntu 20-something years ago, but otherwise I\u2019ve been a Windows guy since 3.1. At first, that\u2019s because it\u2019s what we had at home, later because that\u2019s where the games were, and finally out of force of habit (and because that\u2019s where the games were). I brought a desktop to college instead of a laptop (so I could play games), and I\u2019ve been building my own PCs for 18 years. I started my journalism career at Maximum PC magazine, testing gaming PC components.<\/p>\n I try to stay familiar with all the major operating systems because of my job, so in addition to my work MacBook I also have a Chromebook, a ThinkPad, and a collection of older hardware I refuse to get rid of. I can work pretty well in Windows, in macOS, or in ChromeOS.<\/p>\n My experiences with Linux over the past decade, on the other hand, have largely been as a series of extremely optional Tasks:<\/p>\n Trying to set up Homebridge on a Raspberry Pi. It sort of worked but was stymied by my home network setup, and I eventually replaced it with Home Assistant.Setting up a Beepy<\/a>, a kind of a bootleg Linux handheld with a tiny monochrome screen and a BlackBerry keyboard. This took longer than I wanted, but it worked in the end, and I learned that using a command-line interface with a BlackBerry keyboard on a tiny monochrome screen is my version of hell. Running a Linux VM on my Chromebook so I could use Obsidian<\/a>, my preferred note-taking app, which doesn\u2019t have a web interface. This was a pleasant experience and I have no complaints. [deep breath] Setting up three different virtual machines using the Windows Subsystem for Linux so I could build keyboard firmware: one for QMK, one for ZMK, and I think the third was because the first QMK one stopped working. All of these were on my old desktop, on which the entire Linux subsystem somehow broke beyond repair. <\/p>\n All of those projects, except the Chromebook one, took longer than expected, and cut into my vanishingly rare discretionary time. That\u2019s also the time I use for gaming, reading, staring into the void, and half-starting organizational projects, so you can see how precious it is to me.<\/p>\n The prospect of instead using that time trying to get my computer back to a baseline level of functionality \u2014 that is, as useful as it was before I tried installing Linux \u2014 is tempting, but it\u2019s also why I haven\u2019t done it yet.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a good time to try gaming on Linux. Antonio and Sean have been having fun with Bazzite<\/a>, a Linux distro that mimics SteamOS; my friend and former colleague Will Smith is cohosting a PCWorld podcast called Dual Boot Diaries<\/a> with this exact premise.<\/p>\n Imagine this but Linux. Photo by Nathan Edwards \/ The Verge<\/p>\n And what better device to try it on than my personal desktop with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor<\/a> and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super graphics card<\/a>? I just rebuilt this thing. The Windows install is only like six months old. It\u2019s working about as well as Windows does.<\/p>\n So really, why wouldn\u2019t I blow that up and start over?<\/p>\n Based on listening to two and a half episodes of Dual Boot Diaries and a brief text conversation with Will, I\u2019m going to install CachyOS<\/a>, an Arch-based distro optimized for gaming on modern hardware, with support for cutting-edge CPUs and GPUs and an allegedly easy setup.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t expect things to go smoothly. I don\u2019t really know what I\u2019m doing, and Linux is still a very small percentage of the PC gaming world. As of the most recent Steam Hardware & Software Survey<\/a> \u2014 the best proxy we have for PC gaming hardware info as a whole \u2014 just over 3 percent of Steam users are running Linux. Of those, 27 percent are using SteamOS (and therefore a Steam Deck), 10 percent are using Arch, 6 percent are using CachyOS, 4 percent are using Bazzite, and the rest are split over a bunch of distros.<\/p>\n So if anything goes wrong in my install, it\u2019ll be a lot of forum-hopping and Discord searching to figure it all out. But I\u2019ve cleverly arranged it so the stakes are only medium: I have other machines to work on while my desktop is inevitably borked (and to run programs like Adobe Creative Suite), and if I end up spending hours of my discretionary time learning Linux instead of gaming, well, that\u2019s not the worst outcome.<\/p>\n Maybe it\u2019ll all go smoothly and I\u2019ll report back in a few weeks, another prophet of the revolution. Maybe it\u2019ll go terribly and I\u2019ll come crawling back. 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