For most of the last thirty years, buying a home computer meant buying Windows, whether you wanted it or not. That assumption is starting to wobble. Microsoft ended free support for Windows 10 on 14 October 2025, leaving millions of perfectly good PCs and laptops facing a choice: pay for extended updates, buy new hardware for Windows 11, or try something else entirely. A growing number of people, and indeed entire governments, are choosing something else.

The numbers are small, but moving

Let’s be honest about scale first. Linux is still a minority sport on the desktop. StatCounter put it at around 3% of worldwide desktop operating systems in April 2026, with Windows on 66.6% and macOS on 7.34%. But the direction of travel is what matters. Linux sat at 2.76% in mid 2022, hit an all time monthly high of 4.44% in July 2024, and crossed 5% in the United States for the first time in June 2025. Gamers, long the group with the best excuse to stay on Windows, are shifting too. Valve’s Steam Hardware Survey recorded Linux at 5.33% in March 2026, its highest figure ever, helped enormously by the Steam Deck and the Proton compatibility layer that lets thousands of Windows games run on Linux without fuss.

Why bother switching?

The most immediate reason is hardware. Windows 11 has strict requirements, most notably TPM 2.0 and a relatively recent processor, which ruled out a huge number of machines that still work perfectly well. If you have a 2017 laptop that flies through email, browsing and documents, being told it belongs in the bin is galling. A mainstream Linux distribution such as Linux Mint or Ubuntu will happily run on that same machine, often faster than Windows 10 did, and will keep receiving security updates for years at no cost.

Cost is the second draw. The operating system is free, the office suite (LibreOffice) is free, and the vast majority of software you install through the built in app stores is free. There are no licence keys, no subscriptions, and no nagging to sign up for Microsoft 365.

Then there is the question of who your computer actually works for. Windows 11 ships with advertising in the Start menu, persistent prompts to use Edge and OneDrive, telemetry that is awkward to switch off, and features like Recall that made many people uneasy. Linux distributions, by and large, do none of this. Your desktop is quiet. Updates happen when you say so. Nothing tries to sell you anything.

The honest downsides

Switching is not painless, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. The big one is software compatibility. The full desktop versions of Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and many industry specific applications simply do not run natively on Linux. There are workarounds (web versions, Wine, virtual machines) and excellent alternatives (LibreOffice, GIMP, Darktable), but if your workflow depends on a specific Windows program, test it thoroughly before you commit.

Gaming, while vastly improved, still has gaps. The main problems are multiplayer titles that use kernel level anti-cheat, such as certain popular shooters, which the publishers have chosen not to support on Linux. Single player games are mostly fine.

Hardware support is generally good these days, but printers, fingerprint readers and some Wi-Fi chips can still be awkward. And there is a learning curve. Not a cliff face, particularly with beginner friendly distributions like Mint, but things live in different places, and occasionally a fix involves the terminal. If the idea of typing a command fills you with dread, budget some patience.

Finally, family tech support becomes your job. There’s no manufacturer helpline for Linux, though community forums are genuinely helpful and usually faster than any call centre.

Europe is voting with its feet

What makes this moment different from previous rounds of “year of the Linux desktop” optimism is that large European public bodies are actually doing it, at serious scale, and mostly citing digital sovereignty rather than cost.

The standout is Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s northernmost state, which is removing Microsoft software from around 30,000 government workstations. Word and Excel have given way to LibreOffice, Outlook to Open-Xchange, Teams to open source alternatives, with Windows itself being replaced by Linux. By late 2025 roughly 80% of those workplaces had migrated, and the state expects to save more than 15 million euros in licence fees. The Register covered the original announcement here: https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/04/germanys_northernmost_state_ditches_windows/

Denmark’s Ministry of Digital Affairs began phasing out Windows and Office 365 in favour of Linux and LibreOffice in 2025, with Copenhagen and Aarhus, the country’s two largest cities, moving in the same direction. The French city of Lyon is replacing Office with OnlyOffice, Windows with Linux and SQL Server with PostgreSQL across a government of nearly 10,000 staff (https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/26/lyon_leaving_microsoft/). And in April 2026, France’s minister for public accounts announced plans to migrate the country’s 2.5 million government desktops away from Microsoft altogether.

The trigger points vary, but a recurring theme is unease about depending on American companies for critical infrastructure. The incident that concentrated minds was Microsoft allegedly blocking the email account of the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor following US sanctions in 2025. Whatever the full story, European officials took note: access to your own documents should not depend on decisions made in Washington or Redmond.

Should you jump?

If your computing life is a browser, email, documents, photos and streaming, you will barely notice the difference, and your old hardware gets a second life. If you rely on specific Windows software, or you play the wrong multiplayer games, stay put or dual boot.

The sensible route is to try before you buy. Download Linux Mint, write it to a USB stick, and boot from it. You can run the whole system from the stick without touching your Windows installation. Spend an afternoon with it. Worst case, you have lost an afternoon. Best case, you have found out that the operating system your computer came with was never the only option after all.