Windows has a rather famous bad habit of nuking any other OSes installed on the same drive, so you really do need an extra separate drive, which is inconvenient if you don't already have a separate drive.

Yeah this happened to me at least once, and I had to spend several hours with low-level recovery software to get my files back. This was the catalyst that finally got me to ditch windows for good 7 years ago.

This used to happen to me. But there was a time I just had two different drives. With different OS in it and used the bios selector to boot what I wanted

Yeah, it's also why you should install Windows first and then Linux not the other way round.

And changing your bootloader (every update) and timezone (every boot)

I tried to do this, but booting into a different OS depending on the task just turned into a chore. I tried going full Linux but despite the claims, many games don't "just work" out of the box. Many require tweaking, at minimum. Of the top 100 games in Proton, only 9% are "Tier 1," and reading reviews, even that doesn't guarantee a flawless experience. (https://www.protondb.com/dashboard) On top of this, kernel level anti-cheat games are not supported at all, and trying to run them in VMs result in permanent bans. Worse still, many peripherals have zero driver support. I have Fanatec wheels and pedals and could not get them to run in Linux.

I could live with using Linux for web browsing, but because it doesn't do the other stuff I like, I ended up just staying in Windows and eventually uninstalled Linux.

Mirrors my experience very closely. I really /want/ to use Linux since I really do like GNOME over the Windows Desktop, but if half my peripherals don't work (in this case an Elgato mic where my friends would say I'm either exploding their eardrums or too quiet, and my CREATIVE USB DAC) I'm just very demoralized when trying to use Linux to play games. I've tried the dual boot route, but a spontaneous Discord message of "hop in loser, we're going gaming!" turns into "let me reboot my machine and then Windows update and now my game has to update and it's now 10pm I have to go to bed" just makes me stick with Windows full time.

I'm still really rooting for the Year of the Linux Desktop, and it does continue to get better and better, but I'll keep rooting from the sidelines.

I very much agree. The driver support won't happen until Linux reaches a much larger install base, but that has some hurdles. First, unless Valve creates some kind of kernel-level anti-cheat for SteamOS, we'll never see some of the most popular online FPSs. Frequent cheating is a red line for most players.

Second, Linux needs a standardised *and enforced* application installation method like .exe. One should never, ever, for any reason, ever, need to use the CLI to install an application. Yet there are so many applications out there which require the use of guides/manuals and the CLI to install, configure, or use. This is partly a dev preference, partly to save time, and partly because it's difficult to build and maintain distinct UI for different distros which each have their own quirks. People often ask, "why don't they release this on Linux?" But that's not actually what they're asking. They're really asking, "why don't they release this software on 20 distinct operating systems?" Each distro might have 0.1% of their total addressable market. Unfortunately, even if SteamOS enforces some kind of package manager like flatpak, that's not going to force devs to use it. It would need to be Linux-wide, and that will never happen. So we're left with fragmented install methods across multiple package managers, and a huge headache for people who just want their OS to get out of the way.

This is the way. I've been dual booting with Ubuntu for almost 20 years now and my main finding these days is just how easy it has become and how rarely I need to switch to Windows. Sure, it happens and the option is always there, but Ubuntu as a daily driver is solid.

Why stop with only 2 OS’s? I triple boot with Haiku.