I'd switch to Linux in the blink of an eye if I didn't have to worry about my games working. WINE is great and all, but it's still not 100% compatible.
Games are that incredibly painful holdout. I'm in a similar boat. I have an HTPC in my living room that runs Kodi, along with custom launchers for Steam and RetroArch so that I can control everything with a bluetooth controller.
The amazing thing is that I could already switch it over to Linux via KodiBuntu or some other distro and get 90% of my day-to-day functionality. But then there's the Windows-only library of games that I have on Steam--games that I've paid hundreds of dollars for over the years, that I simply don't have the energy to try fiddling for hours with in WINE. And that damn remaining 10% is what keeps that PC on Windows 10.
As much as I despise W10, Microsoft has the gamer market by the balls, and they know it. I try as much as I can to buy the Remastered Classics of games like Baldur's Gate 2 or Planescape: Torment that include proper Linux ports, just to chip away at that dependency, but there are plenty of games that in all likelihood will never have first-class Linux support.
Do you also own a PS3, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, Wii, and a Nintendo Switch? Do you miss the exclusives on them? You'll survive without the handful of games you have to leave behind.
FWIW there are some games on those systems i'd love to play (Last of Us being an example), but at least i know that they'll eventually be emulated so even if it takes 10, 15 or whatever years i'll play them at some point.
But the two major differences between what you are talking about and what others are talking about are that a) we have the hardware, it is totally a software issue and b) we are mainly talking for software we already have paid for, not software we may or may not buy in the future.
But hopefully as Linux becomes more popular with gaming (and Microsoft is distracted with UWP and the like), Wine will also see improvements that make gaming better. Already since Valve shown up and rattled things, Wine's gaming compatibility seems to have improved a lot compared to previous years.
>we are mainly talking for software we already have paid for, not software we may or may not buy in the future.
A solution for this is to set up dual boot or whatever and use it only for the Windows-only games, until you get bored of them. Then kill Windows and you're free.
This is the exact path I took ~15 years ago. Once I realized I didn't care much for the 'exclusively windows' games, I killed my windows partition and haven't looked back since. The exciting twist to this story is that many of those games are now playable on Linux because of Wine!
Yes, this is what i'm usually doing, although i tend to use Windows even for games that are available on Linux since they tend to perform and/or look better. I mainly use Linux for gaming when i'm already doing something on Linux and i don't feel like rebooting.
I know this isn't exactly what you were saying, but I recently bought myself the (ancient) Star Wars Empire at War games, and they run better under WINE than they did under Windows 10. There's some problem that makes it drop frames and become unplayable in Windows.
Moreso on topic, I actually do much of my gaming in Linux, I only have a couple of AAA titles that I use Windows for (Elite: Dangerous and AC:Origins), everything else is Linux (KSP, X-Com, X-Com 2, RimWorld).
I often try and make a point of emailing a "Thanks for supporting Linux!" to the companies who release the ones I want to play, just so they know we are out there.
I switched to only playing and buying games that work on Linux a few years ago and haven't regretted a moment of it. Indie games might not be as shiny and realistic looking but they're typically more creative and deep.
Then donate however many thousands of dollars you were going to spend on Autodesk/etc licenses to Blender, Krita, Gimp, etc. Blender and Krita are competitive with their commercial counterparts and Gimp is getting there.
Note that the biggest issue with such programs isn't so much the features as the file formats these programs use that came to become de facto standards in their industries.
I was just yesterday talking with a friend of mine who worked in architecture visualization and told me that basically the main reason he cannot use blender, even though he'd really like to learn it (and it would save him money on licensing), and he uses 3ds max instead is that 3ds max can read (he didn't care about writing) all the file formats from more specialized software (not max files) that his clients send to him and that is basically the reason every firm that does the same thing cannot use blender.
When i suggested that maybe some of those firms could pay developers to implement and/or improve support for those formats, he said that none would do such a thing as the bigger firms who can pay developers do not really care and can afford to use 3ds max while those who would benefit more by switching to blender (smaller firms and freelancers) cannot pay the developers.
I'm a very strong advocate of Open Source Software, and all things Linux as well.
I've used Gimp, Inkscape, and others... but sometimes you just need to get work done, and the closed source proprietary application is what you need, I'm sorry to say.
Donating thousands of dollars to Gimp today isn't going to put it on par with Photoshop today... I wish it would. Maybe it could be in a few years... but I need to get work done right now.
Sometimes you do need a commercial interest behind something to drive it's progress. That doesn't mean it has to be closed and proprietary, but they often are, sadly.
Yes, but not every user who needs a program can even do that.
The truth is that people are shit at using a computer (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/). At some point we need to draw the obvious conclusion from that: users capable of useful contribution to a project are a significant minority compared to the number of users who need or wish to use that software. How many people develop software? About 5%. How many people need to use software? 95% or more? Point being, no matter how important or unimportant your software is, you are guaranteed to have a user base predominantly incapable of contributing to the project.
This is why the constant responses of, "Patches welcome," or similar in response to user complaints is so hostile to users. It's saying to users, "This application is only for experts," which is likely to only appeal to experts. Since experts are so rare, that doesn't seem like a particularly inspiring response. You're just driving users away from your project.
Yes, anybody can contribute to an open source project. No, not everybody is capable of doing so meaningfully. Yes, anybody can recognize a bad design or bug. No, not everybody is capable of recognizing a good or correct design or fixing a bug. If Linux is to ever become an operating system for the desktop, we must accept that the majority of users are not going to be developers, and a user cannot be expected to become a developer just because they want to use a computer. It is no longer 1975.
The only exception to the above is if your project has a user base entirely devoted to programmers. That's precisely why those projects get so much development time.
