Comment by 20after4
19 hours ago
I've been using nothing but Linux on my desktop since 2013. Converted my parents around 2015. Rarely a complaint from them and I haven't even once considered switching back to Windows. My shiny new Macbook Air is collecting dust. Almost all of my gaming is done on a SteamDeck or a Linux desktop. The only applications that I can think of where Windows or Mac are still relevant would be CAD and Audio/Video production. And even those are use-cases where Linux has viable options. Actually, Video probably doesn't even belong here since one of the most popular video packages (DaVinci Resolve) has Linux support and there are multiple open source options like Kdenlive. For music, it's really hard to beat Apple's ecosystem: Mac and iOS have an incredible variety of affordable and really high quality audio applications, however, the gap is narrowing with lots of great music software on Linux as well. There are free software options for CAD and 3d Modeling (Blender, Freecad) but most of the popular CAD software is either Windows only or Windows/Mac. Some of this may be possible to get working under Wine but I haven't tried.
This mirrors my experience. Most stuff you do on Windows "just works" on Linux nowadays, and when it doesn't, there are low-friction alternatives.
The one pain point for me is film and book scanning. AFAICT there are exactly zero Linux software packages that will play nice with my Epson V800 or my Fujitsu SV600. I keep a Windows laptop around (second-gen ThinkPad X1 since you asked) and its only job is to talk to those devices. Firewall doesn't let it get on the internet, its only network access is to move scans onto my NAS.
For film scanning (which I do only very rarely) I've resorted to just using my digital camera with a light box to illuminate the film and a nice macro lens to focus on the frame.