fate6 wrote:Other than games linux has had everything I could ever want and in fact can run the games as well but the requirements go up and its a pain in the a "A" to set up unless you run then in a VM but then we have that increase in spec requirements.
Anywhooo end of the day the choice is yours but I think you will be surprised by how a good linux distro can breath life into an old PC, Or go nuts and get some crazy fancy set up to make full use of some Tri-SLI 980's or something.
If you have multiple graphics cards and two monitors,
vga passthrough running windows in a vm with a dedicated monitor is probably the best option. Though I'm guessing that most of us don't have this option. I stopped dualbooting maybe half a year ago and decided the booting into windows wasn't worth the hassle.
I don't want to get too off topic, but I do want to say that I don't think recommending Arch to someone who is completely unfamiliar with linux is a good idea. Not because it's necessarily "hard"; it's time consuming and probably more likely to cause frustration in most inexperienced people (who are more likely to screw something up). Suddenly they're attempting to install and run a distro with no graphical installer (unless an Arch variant is used) that installs very little default software. They have to have a much better understanding of partitions, different filesystems, learn at least some shell, learn what the heck an fstab or pacman.conf is, and then choose all their software or a Desktop Environment to start with. At that point, plain Arch isn't really all that more lightweight than another distro that bundles this by default. I think Arch is works better for people who already know exactly what they want and prefer scripted to friendly installation/setup. Especially for someone who gets easily distracted by choices this becomes hel.l on earth... When I was on linux mint things were like, "I'm fine with a browser and this default stuff. Oh Banshee crashes when reading my music library; I'll just use Clementine. Oh I'll just use the graphical package manager for now." When I moved to Arch, things were more like "Oh I need to repartion my hard drive, figure out how to install this distro, install zsh immediately after and read through the entire manual while simultaneously learning vim and emacs throwing out sublime, learn shell scripting and tmux, learn LaTeX and throw out libre office, try every DE and then not use any of them, try every display manager and then not use any of them, pick one of the 20+ mpd clients, pick a file manager, pick a mail client, spend hours customizing everything, etc."
Tl;dr Arch is not noob friendly and may cause unproductivity in obsessive people.