I was talking to my dad yesterday and he talked about how he dual booted windows and Linux in his college days. I immediately left to download Ubuntu, I feel so dumb for forgetting it’s an option. I literally only use windows so I can play Fortnite with friends. PSA: you can have both Linux and Windows, or you can use a vm in Linux. Be (mostly) free from Microsoft’s clammy hands.
Most people forget you can also run a Linux VM inside Windows if all the other options don’t work for you.
It protects your private data from virusses, doesn’t let Microsoft’s telemetry spy on your usage and browsing, and gives you more control.
Just limit what you do in Windows to what needs it running natively and do everything else inside the VM.
This generally works for people who only need command-line or headless access though. I’ve been waiting for proper GPU virtualization and partitioning to actually work on consumer gpus for so long now that I’m doubtful it will ever be a thing. And the hardware industry has gradually transitioned to single GPU setups now so PCIe lanes for multi-GPU setups are harder to come by, especially with recent motherboards dedicating more and more PCIe lanes to NVMe slots. Still, even GPU pass-through with VFIO is not a trivial thing at all to get up and running. Its a travesty that CPU virtualization is so mature and far along in the consumer space, juxtaposed with a seemingly absolute big fat zero on the GPU virtualization front.
You could get away with using VMWare for their proprietary GPU virtualization feature but besides simple sandboxes for testing, I will not personally get too far into it as the experience is not great.
It only protects your data if you encrypt the virtual disk. And then you could still lose it to a ransomware attack.