> The other potentially obvious question is why bother using an OS that’s out of support when Linux is so good?

I'm in the process of setting up a Linux desktop to replace my Win10 one, and for me it's these (if anyone has suggestions for migration or replacement, I'd love some opinions!)

- Lightroom. If anyone knows how to either run this under Linux, or migrate an entirely catalog of photos (plus edits) to something open source (including the Negative Lab Pro plugin), that would be amazing.

- MusicBee. There just does not seem to be a good music manager for Linux that can replace MusicBee. I rarely use it as a music player, there are dozens of great options for Linux music players, but MusicBee feeds my Airsonic instance, and I have not found a good way to manage music graphically in a way that maintains this setup.

- Games. This is really getting better and better each year...but I regularly play Microsoft Flight Simulator and haven't even tried to get that running in Linux yet (anyone have good experiences getting this working?)

For games, my tip is that if you happen to be in CachyOS or some similar distribution, make sure you use the bore kernel for gaming.

I switched from the standard kernel to the bore kernel and went from a pretty disappointing experience in terms of performance and stutters to a really great one.

Musicbee works fine in Wine (in my experience). It's annoying I have to use it that way, but I'm not expecting it to be ported any time soon.

> - MusicBee. There just does not seem to be a good music manager for Linux that can replace MusicBee. I rarely use it as a music player, there are dozens of great options for Linux music players, but MusicBee feeds my Airsonic instance, and I have not found a good way to manage music graphically in a way that maintains this setup.

For a traditional "all batteries included" collection management music player try Strawberry and Quod Libet. You should also look into the MuiscBrainz Picard tagger, it's a bit unwieldy to use but is very powerful once you learn it's wonky workflow.

It seems that various MS Flight Simulator editions run on Proton. Focus on recent ratings, as the overall score reflects often reflects old versions of Proton.

https://www.protondb.com/search?q=microsoft%20flight%20simul...

> - Games. This is really getting better and better each year...but I regularly play Microsoft Flight Simulator and haven't even tried to get that running in Linux yet (anyone have good experiences getting this working?)

It's a major step up in power but the steam deck has really pushed the wine/proton environment to near parity. The only things that really don't work through it reliably is anti-cheat stuff that I really don't want on my machine anyway.

I can't speak for the experience with nvidia drivers but it's pretty amazing how far it's come.