With the Windows 10 desktop operating system not really delivering what I wanted on my laptop, I prefer to use Debian instead. And on my desktop I prefer to use Ubuntu 16.10 for various Linux tasks. This suits me better than Windows 10 ever could. I managed to get Steam and Arma 3 running on Ubuntu. That is pretty good indeed. It runs better than on Windows 7 on the same hardware. A good sign for Linux gaming. If only it was the latest version. It is 1.58.000 and it should be version 1.64. But at least it has the 3D editor and good performance. The mpv video player for playing movies works extremely well, just as well as MPC-HC on Windows 7. And I can also install Google Earth and Chrome for browsing and viewing maps of the world. The NVidia driver installation can be a pain when I wish to use 32-bit applications, but it is not too painful to get a game running from Steam. They even featured a tiling window manager in Arma 3 running on a laptop. The fact that nearly all hardware these days is auto-detected and setup by Linux is a good thing, this makes installation and running the desktop for the first time easy.
There are drivers built into the kernel for using hardware like NVidia, but I needed the proper proprietary drivers to get the aforementioned Steam games running. There are literally hundreds of games that will run on SteamOS or Linux. This is incredible. This means that Linux gaming will get stronger and stronger as time goes on. I just wish that there were better drivers for Linux for graphics cards and I did not need to install closed source drivers to get a simple game running. But the fact that this works is a step in the right direction. The audacious music player is a free application that looks just like Winamp and can play a huge variety of formats. Unlike Windows Media player. The fact that Microsoft are removing the Group Policy settings from Windows 10 is troubling, as this is a good way to customize your Windows desktop machine by disabling various settings to enhance security. That is why I will stick with Windows 7 instead. I have tweaked my operating system to disable the automatic Windows 10 update as I do not want to run that for Windows tasks. The venerable Windows 7 is supported until 2020, so stick with that if you like Windows sometimes, and dual booting works very well these days. And the best thing about Linux is that I can run sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade whenever I wish to update my system and I do not need to wait for Windows Update to run, I can just update the packages whenever I wish. I only need to reboot to load a new kernel. Amazon AWS is another good way to use Linux. I can setup an instance on the Amazon AWS service and run it 24/7 and just SSH into it whenever I need to run Linux commands from a Windows box.
Amazon AWS do have various terms and conditions, especially regarding penetration testing from the Amazon AWS instance, but that is fair enough, and torrenting through a VPN hosted by Amazon can get you in trouble, but it is very useful when you are behind a proxy at work for example, but you can connect to the VPN through port 443 and the proxy can be bypassed. It means that they cannot spy upon your network traffic when it is an encrypted tunnel, it would look just like normal HTTPS encrypted traffic. That is the advantage of using a VPN connection. There are devices that can perform deep packet inspection of HTTPS traffic by decrypting it and then reencrypting the packets to be sent to the browser, but this requires that the user install a custom certificate into their browser. This would only really be used at a workplace to find out what an employee is doing on a HTTPS connection. But there are newer solutions as well, they are just not instant.