windows 10

Good points, if I'm using windows on my vm machine, I tend to disconnect the ethernet connection, so I'm testing it without internet access. It's not always possible but it is damage limitation.

Like I said, I was against using mac os as well, but the truth is, for the graphics side of things nothing beats photoshop etc, and that is something linux is unlikely to support in the immediate short term. There are other good alternatives such as affinity designer, which doesn't require a creative cloud license - but again this is available only for macs.

Also I've found the problem is cross compatibility with other designers who use creative cloud as there go to. Linux and mac now support a lot of games as well, if you check out steam, so it's closing the gap in the gaming market. Something windows has always had a firm monopoly on.

I'm usually not that paranoid about Windows, since I'm only really using it to test my own site and some other minor tasks. Besides, if my VM gets infected, it's not a big deal to destroy the image and any portions of the disk it can access, then load a new image. If I really wanted it to be disconnected from the outside world, I usually trust the VM software enough to just uncheck the box that says "Cable Connected" under the network settings.

Of course, I do very minimal amounts of design/image work. I usually prefer to do mock-ups in my test site using HTML/CSS/JS, and my employer has a graphics designer to do the real design work (or give me suggestions) and the Photoshop work.

@PaulD: The biggest thing that's given me trouble with Linux in the last ~5 years is WiFi, because the most commonly-used WiFi chips in notebooks don't have open-source drivers (and it can be painful to get the closed-source driver installed and working on a machine which normally relies on WiFi for internet access). One of the things we try to do when we purchase new Windows computers here is check whether the machine is available with Linux pre-installed in the same hardware configuration. This usually ensures that the hardware at least has Linux drivers available, even if some of it may not be open-source.

Another minor roadblock is that some of the newer BIOS (in the last 3-5 years, especially on machines shipped with Windows 8+) may need some minor configuration changes to load Linux, though the boot-loader itself may have changed to address those issues. Ubuntu has some pretty thorough documentation on this, too: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI

Bonfire

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