People forget that Linux isn't a replacement for windows. It's a alternative and totally different system.
It also depends on user requirements:
Only office stuff with some multimedia?
Games?
Security?
Windows is also maintained by a lot more people and Linux is a security desaster and years behind windows security. Linux folks don't want hear that, believe and say it's wrong but it isn't. Security experts like Daniel Micay post some about that.
and about "OpenSource": I love OpenSource but nowadays people think that such software is automatically secure cause everyone read the source.
first only few people *can* read the source and understand it. If one beside the dev at all.
reading the code is necessary for every change / update.
second it's mostly build in free time / for free which means the maintenance is low and slow which isn't good for security again.
A lot of OpenSource projects get inactive after some time and a lot of people start / fork another project which do the same, instead of helping already existing projects.
Same for the many Linux distris: one guy make some random change like add different wallpaper & icons and publish it. He don't care about security at all and after short time he will stop this project and user's are need to switch again. With that time and power he better help existing projects but nope, not so in OpenSource.
I personally only use Windows 10 on all PC's and run Raspbian (Debian for Raspberry Pi) on my two Raspberry Pi's.
All very good points!
It's very true and something I have noticed myself. There are many reasons as to why Linux on personal computers hasn't taken off since it came to existence. Linux like MacOS did some things right when it comes to security, but in all honesty their "more secure than Windows" mantra really has to do with the fact that their market share is very low by comparison. That doesn't mean that malware cannot be written for those OSes, nor does it mean that they cannot be hacked either.
From what I have seen poking around the open source/Linux communities, I feel like they are really beating themselves at their own game. It's exactly like you said, there are way more Linux distros than you can count, which only leads to confusion. You have in-fighting within these communities over stupidity IMHO. Take Arch Linux for example, the "Arch Linux" community takes issues with Manjaro, which is based off Arch Linux. Someone using Manajro asks the Arch Linux community for help, they get chastised saying don't you dare ask any questions here, Manjaro is not Arch Linux, blah, blah, blah...
While I can appreciate that open source and Linux has always preached about having choice and that people can use and share code, etc... IMHO it really hasn't made things better, only worse. Like you said the majority of these projects are being done on the side so over time many of them just stop. You have this stupid in-fighting, so someone gets mad and goes "fine will fork and do my own thing." Also I think they have also created this stupid assumption that everything has about Linux/Open source has to be free.
Sometimes I don't think they realize that they are the ones causing the problems, not MS, nor anyone else. If I was a big game developer, or software company, why should I waste resources developing for Linux when the ecosystem is so fragmented and there's no constancy between all the distros. At least with Windows and/or MacOS, it's all the same. Same UI, same everything, so there is far more consistency compared to Linux.
Personally I feel like if Linux wants to really take off, they need to come together and work together. Firstly they need to have far fewer distros than is out there currently and only have 1 or 2 DE's max. They also need to have far more consistency then they currently do, ie: a program that is developed for Ubuntu for example can also work and be installed on Fedora without having to recompile the code for rmp and such. Finally, they need to rely far less on the command line to do things.
I'm guessing that you want this to run it on a VM, I've not tried that with Windows for some time. I did try running Windows 7 as a VM on Linux maybe 6-7 years ago, it wasn't a good experience. Things might have improved by now though.
Yes it's pretty much a VM. You almost set it up like a dual boot with it's own HDD/SSD, but you can set it up in Linux to run as a VM. You can then give it permission to have direct access to the hardware CPU and GPU, etc.. so while running as a VM, it pretty much runs as if it's installed directly to the system. Only issues are is that you need two GPUs, a CPU with enough cores/threads and a motherboard with decent IOMMU groupings. When configured it's nice as you don't have to dual boot, but dual booting is far easier to implement by comparison.
