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I’ve disliked ideology as a personal philosophy. Nothing ever really applies in all cases. This is why, while I think of the idea of open source software is awesome, it is not awesome if you have to sacrifice doing things you need to do in the name of philosophical purity.
I share the views stated by Evan Liebovich in a video he made last year. He is more of a proponent of open source than I will ever be, but he has had to reckon with the fact that Linux is falling behind on the desktop, is a low priority for developers, and if you actually need to get things done for many ordinary use cases, you need to install Windows. Evan’s video was shot from his Windows 10 desktop.
Linux will still be the low-cost desktop solution for developers, sporting a plethora of sophisticated programming tools. In that one area, they are way ahead of all other operating systems. However, in other respects for example, Microsoft can support the latest scanners and media cards, which Linux is often slow in adopting.
The reason they are slow is, as of 2021, according to Evan, Linux is installed in only 1.8% of all desktops. This ought to be regarded as minor, considering Linux’s unquestioned dominance in android devices, Chromebooks, business infrastructure, and internet servers all over the world. Linux has scored dominance in nearly every platform imaginable. Just not on the desktop PC.
People writing software and drivers for the Windows PC are likely to stay programming in that domain, since that is where 98% of the market is. It is not very likely that most companies, especially small ones, are going to write drivers for hardware or peripherals such as adaper cards, printers or scanners since there is not enough money in it. But even if they do, it is not as likely to fully take advantage of the hardware.
Nowadays you can download licences for Windows 10 which had been taken from old, discarded machines. This is legal if a legitimately purchased licence was on one machine, is no longer used there, and is transferred to a new machine. Microsoft will have a problem if one license is on more than one machine. Otherwise, there should be no problem. Ali Express sells licences for as low as CAN$3.50 by some vendors. Some sell with DVD, others sell only the license code. In the latter case, you can go to Microsoft.com and download your own image to a USB stick, 16GB minimum.
Microsoft has, in the view of many, moved on from the “OS wars”, and have allowed users to incorporate WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux version 2) into their base operating system. This has allowed users to run Linux applications, and even X-Windows applications, on their Windows desktop. Another gesture to open source is their purchase of GitHub, and have also joined the Linux Foundation. MS Teams also has a version made for Linux.
Even without WSL2, there are many open source (FOSS) applications that have windows versions. And chances are, they run better in Windows, since writers of video drivers, for example, likely have better support of graphics acceleration. The same can also be said for audio, printer support, network card support and scanner support. Such FOSS applications which do not use WSL2 can be found on sites such as TTCS OSSWIN Online (Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society collection of free Open Source Software for WINdows), which has one of the most comprehensive FOSS archives for MS Windows.
It is still possible, by and large, to have a FOSS computer where the only “large” software expense is the Windows OS itself.