Hi there!

I’ve been with Windows my entire IT-Life, including working as a System Administrator for over 16 years on a workstation level. I’m very comfortable with Windows and “know” enough to get rid of most of the annoyances MS likes to throw at us.

Now as MS moves forward and more and more cloud functionality is introduced, my worries grow. I’ll still use it for work, but on my personal devices, I feel like I want to divest.

I’m lurking on some Linux stuff, and I see some worrying comments there as well.

My use case:

• Gaming (Majority on Steam, some on GoG)
• Streaming / Recording via OBS
• Light video editing
• General browsing and faffing about
• some VTT use

Nothing Linux Mint won’t be able to do. I am also not averse to dual booting or simply running Windows in a VM for anything I am missing, should such a thing be encountered (I am fairly fond of MS Office, don’t kill me for it, again a thing of habit and depth of existing knowledge on troubleshooting and functionality).

So here’s some of what I read that makes me very hesitant:

• People comment about “Oh yeah, it’s fairly stable but you’ll have to reinstall now and again”
• While I understand encryption with recovery keys isn’t truly secure, my threat model doesn’t require it and will hamper me more if I encrypt a drive and cannot recover it should something go wrong (especially in combination with point one here)

So some questions following from that:

• Are there any simple backup solutions I can run locally with a NAS?
• How much troubleshooting will likely be required based on my use case and how much of that will be command line? (obviously that’s a total crapshoot of an approximation to make, so any guess is welcome)

I’ve not needed to reinstall my Windows 10 system for a solid 3 or 4 years but looking at EoL of it approaching and not really wanting to go to Windows 11…

Thanks for any (constructive) input in advance!