I have an Intel NUC that has it's original Windows (10) install on it's internal spinning rust drive, and Ubuntu on it's NVME SSD (and a pair of USB drives in software Raid 1)
It's the Windows box I keep around for odd but specific tasks like the running the 3D wing and airfoil simulation software I have, or the CNC mill firmware update tool that only runs Windows. It's also got a few Windows only 3D modelling tools and GCode creation tools that I occasionally need for the laser cutter or CNC mill or one of the 3D printers.
99.9% of it's time is spent booted into Linux running Emby and PiHole and Home Bridge and doing file server duties.
I've had dual-booted until a couple of years ago, when i decided to ditch Windows for good, since i wasn't playing videogames, and the few i may wanted to play were playable on Steam. If i had needed Windows for a specific videogame or program, i would still be dual-booting today.
Well... your comment has both the question and an answer: It's quite possible that fewer people bother dual-booting because it's less needed; as WINE/proton gets better and more programs have native Linux support, the need to have a Windows install on hand diminishes.
I just realised writing another response, that a large portion of the reasons I need to run Windows occasionally if to use weird hardware that's windows specific. Things that run odd USB protocols, our even worse require a USB-serial converter with a specific chipset.
For me, it's way easier to keep a "hardware Windows machine" available than to debug why these things don't quite work right in a virtualised environment every time I need to use em.
(really they do one thing and it's this. They practically have a corner on the “aftermarket hotswap drive bay accessory” market, and they have more variations than anyone can imagine :V )
Honestly I would love to try the "hotswap M.2 bay" or "hotswap U.2 bay" things, but it really does drive home how uneven the NVMe future is. Consumers get maybe two NVMes on their motherboard, meanwhile you need 16 pcie lanes to drive a 4-bay hotswap thing. We live in a society where a 1-socket server might have 24 nvme bays attached to it and yet consumers can't even populate an addon bay for their gamer case. (bottom text)
really does drive home the lack of pcie lanes on consumer stuff (given how much pcie continues to be the defacto standard for high-speed expansion) and the death of the "workstation"/"HEDT" segment as being a relatively accessible thing. Nowadays there are client machines and servers, and precious little in-between. You almost might as well just buy an Epyc (ROMED8-2T looks really nice) or just buy a used server as a backend/fileserver/NAS.
My computer is not very powerful. Running games or resource-demanding programs on a virtualized Windows would be a significantly worse experience than running them on a bare-metal OS.
People are doing this a lot on handhelds like rog ally and others systems to flip between windoze-only games and those that work under Bazzite or other steam deck-ish distributions fine for improved performance and frame rates over windoze. Usually the DRM-laden vermin require windoze still, most everything else works ok enough with proton in linux now.
I also keep windoze in as minimal space as I can using linux full-time to update lenovo firmware on my tb4 dock and system periodically as I've been burned with firmware updates under linux, so 128gb of a disk for windoze is usually a small sacrifice as a fallback.
Yeah, this is a thing though I wouldn’t pretend to know why. I used to get double the frame rate running World of Warcraft with WINE than I did on actual Windows. Never did dig into why.
I'd imagine the place that is going to run better on windows is GPU drivers... If the game is GPU bound it will probably always run better on windows. If the game has other bottlenecks perhaps WINE can out perform windows.
I have a triple boot setup. Every OS sucks so why not?
It doesn't hurt to have intact alternate OS's ready to go.
I might only use one Linux regularly but there's a devuan and a vanilla windows (+patches from ~1 year/6mo. ago) - it's really no big deal leaving them be. It's just disk space.
windows will probably get nuked soon cause it's on a gen4 NVME - not using that is a waste.
I did for a while in the 2010s but eventually found it too fragile and risky, started booting linux off a removable drive then eventually booting linux and just virtualizing windows, way less risky and I don't care about games so it was fine.
I have an old Dell Latitude that I tri-boot Windows 7, 10, and 11 for testing with my PortableApps.com stuff as some things are better to test on actual hardware rather than in a virtual machine.
