Yes. As you transition to using Windows less and less, you'll get reminded more and more about how much of a pain it is to use, and how much of a Stockholm Syndrome you've developed over years of abuse.
To the point that you'll be avoid Windows as much as you can. You'll be booting your system infrequently enough, that, at every boot, Windows will be unresponsively slow, hogging your CPU and your bandwidth to forcefully update whatever bloatware is in need of an update. It will nag you about needing to restart, it will stand in you way, it will make your experience even more miserable. From time to time it will simply announce that the system will be rebooting in two minutes, without any recourse possible, your work be damned. Because, why not? Who the f*k cares about your work?
Be warned, you might reach a point of no return where you'll be avoiding this abusive piece of bloatware like the plague. You might discover light and happiness at the end of this dark, damp tunnel. You might free yourself from the PTSD you didn't know you were suffering of at the slightest mention of the word "Update".
It will be a liberating experience. Come and join us on the other side.
I have a "media notebook" with Ubuntu 10(?).x.. LTS:
One thing I always see when using this machine - this version at least has some problem with the memory manager: Very often the system comes up from hibernation mode and does not stop swapping whatever stuff to disk, making it unusable until I reboot completely - this at least works on Windows :-D
Can confirm. Daily drive Linux for software development, and have a Linux on a laptop for gaming (Silksong anyone? :D). I keep a Windows 10 partition around on the laptop for Fortnite with friends, but that's about it.
I was actually pleasantly surprised the other day, I booted into Windows for the first time in several months and it was surprisingly quiet. No nags, no bs. Just "normal" stuff like Epic Games forgetting my account again and Windows updates going on in the background.
My friend whose laptop has Windows 11, on the other hand, that was a WILD experience. Similar situation, he mostly only brings it out for gaming with friends. He also had gone several months without booting, and the system was borderline unusable. Like, the battery settings page would refuse to open until he waited for the updates to finish and rebooted. No error, just an infinite loading spinner. Windows 11 also seemed much more aggressive about hogging the laptop's Internet connection -- our laptops were both downloading Windows updates and Fortnite updates at the same time, and my Fortnite update was literally progressing at twice the speed (~200mb/sec vs his ~90mb/sec).
Anyway, all that to say, I don't miss Windows, and anytime I'm exposed to it, that attitude is constantly re-affirmed.
Windows can live in a VM no problem. But, depends on your use case. For GPU heavy usage, you can do GPU passthrough, and that needs a dedicated video card exclusive for the VM. If you only have light usage, like office tools, you can get by the mostly default settings.
I suggest that you just try - it's a couple of hours to install Linux and install Windows in a VM. You can try Linux dual-booting, so, no need to impact your existing system. If you end up not liking the out of the box Win VM performance, there are a couple of tricks that you can try to get substantial improvements.
OK, in my case its just boring business & CRUD apps, no GPU stuff nor gaming (btw: I find most business apps, esp. payment & accounting systems, everything else than boring - feel free to flame me for that :-D )
And can I also use MSSQL server?
(which I could ditch anyway then, I guess, since we are using mainly ORM and no database-specific features)
If your CRUD apps are Winforms I had success with Wine, but you might want to try something else. I've heard good things about avaloniaui.net but never liked XAML so I haven't tried it.
I think you in this case, you should definitely try the VM route. Non-3d user interfaces, networking, etc should all work with no problems, MSSQL included. Do a prototype as soon as you're able, because that will answer most of your questions, and raise new ones as well.
To your second point, yes, I imagine that MSSQL could be exchanged to something else like Postgres, MariaDB or MySQL. Although, maybe you can get away with SQLite too, depending heavily on the use case of course.
On todays hardware, it should be possible to run Windows in a VirtualBox on a Linux System, or am I wrong?
Thinking about this to be my next setup for the next machine (in 1 or 2 years)
Im mainly using corp & office software and MS dev tools - those should be useable in a virtualized Windows?
Any experience?