Microsoft is cracking down on people upgrading to Windows 11 on unsupported hardware

This is just going to push people who aren't locked into Windows, away from Windows, and Linux is making a pretty good argument for itself as a viable alternative atm, particularly for gaming.

Although another option would be to virtualize Windows on a Linux host too, that's what I'm doing right now /w Win10 LTSC for general apps that aren't entirely WINE-friendly, and then Win8.1 for some older games that aren't entirely WINE-friendly, and the Win8.1 VM has my R9 270 being passed through to it over vfio-pci for graphics for that reason.

The Win10 VM is using VirtIO paravirtualized graphics because its intended use case doesn't need anything more than basic acceleration as it was spun up mainly for running CUETools on for the things that app can't do in Mono, eg. like transcoding FLAC images to Vorbis or Opus.

As for gaming beyond the few edge cases that don't run well in WINE that are due to just being old code, I don't play anything that has an anticheat so 99% of my gaming is easily doable in Proton.