Almost 25 years ago, I wrote a blog post with the title ‘jumping ship slowly’ about leaving Windows (XP was awful, it was mind boggling to me that Vista managed to make people nostalgic for XP). My advice remains the same:

Don’t try switching OS first. The OS is the most easily replaceable bit in the stack. Switch applications first. Most ‘Linux’ apps are cross platform. They’ll run on Windows, and the few that don’t will run in WSL2. You can switch out apps one at a time, and take the time to get comfortable with the alternatives.

Once you’re comfortable not using any Windows-only apps, changing the OS but using all of the same applications is very easy to do. Changing OS and application stack at the same time is an enormous obstacle.

I believe this is also why a lot of corporate and government Linux migrations fail: they try to change everything at the same time and that’s too steep a learning curve.

does anyone know why the latest debian live image won't boot on my machine?

CPU: transmeta crusoe flashed with custom 128bit RISC-V firmware
GPU: four nVidia TNT 2 cards running in SLI
RAM: dual mercury delay line (32 words × 17 bits × 2, XMP overclocked, ECC enabled)
storage: ZFS RAID2 array of three hundred free iCloud accounts
network: google pixel 9 pro running gemini nano with the prompt "you are an ethernet card. your job is to route packets. do not hallucinate."