Thanks for the offer, but I don't think it's necessary
My 2008, 8 year old desktop (with a CPU-, graphics and SSD-upgrade from 2011) is fully supported. My equally old Laptop (DELL E6500) is also fully supported, but requires jacking around to support the keyboard shortcuts such as brightness and sound. Somewhere in X, keymappings have to be set. And bluetooth requires some weird stuff to be done as well. This might have been changed in the last few years though.
My new laptop, Dell Precision 7510, is also supported, but nVidia Optimus requires tinkering with Bumblebee and/or Primus, and I've read about some weird stuff with regards to sleeping, auto-shutdown and waking up.
It's always these sort of niggles that finally drive me back to Windows, where everything is just supported by the manufacturers; either out of the box, or by installing a driver. The other thing I don't like is the Linux upgrade chain: upgrade one library to get a new program supported, and you could be looking at an upgrade of half your programs, or maybe your entire operating system. The last thing which kept me from a full time switch is gaming; I don't play a lot of games (an RPG, once in a while), and while I know that most of my games work in Wine, it always requires tinkering.
I tinker and work out problems entire days long at work when programming under Windows, Linux and for the web, and to be honest, when I get home, I'm just done tinkering. I'm getting too old for that. If I want to play a game, I want to do this:
- Go to GOG.com
- Buy/Download the latest version (fully patched up and all)
- Install it
- PLAY
I don't want to do this:
- Go to GOG.com
- Buy/Download the latest version
- Try with Wine
- Find out it doesn't work
- Install PlayOnLinux
- Install a different version of Wine, using its own prefix
- Install the game
- Find out it doesn't work
- Install WineTricks
- Find a howto to see which Tricks are needed....
If I switch to Linux, it's going for day to day stuff only, such as browsing, mailing, and organizing ebooks and music. Gaming and 'special' (non-mainstream) stuff will stay on Windows, or it costs way too much time to get running.