Mildly Infuriating

Why gently?

That and/or a big influx of vulnerable unpatched Windows machines...

Very good point!

I have two Xeon E5-2697A v4's in my system. 32 cores. My machine runs the latest AAA titles like Indiana Jones on maximum settings flawlessly.

Microsoft: "Just throw it away, bro." Bless Lord Gaben for making Proton so good, I can run 95% of my Steam library on Linux, with better performance.

It will be difficult, but technically possible. You’d have to ensure bitlocker is disabled on your windows drive. If you’re not sure what that is, don’t assume that means it’s not enabled. Windows does enable it by default in some cases. It encrypts your drive and you won’t be able to access it.

But in all honesty, I’d recommend just starting from scratch if steam games are what you’re most worried about. First, some of them might not work on Linux. Second, you may encounter strange issues that require redownloading much of your library anyway. Lastly, you’ll want to transfer them to a drive with a Linux file system which will take time. That’s if you even have the drive space to spare. More likely is you’ll be formatting that drive anyway to a Linux filesystem, wiping the contents anyway.

Even with slow internet, redownloading games as needed will be way easier and likely faster.

If you’re unsure what distro to go with, I recommend going with Bazzite. It’s a distro optimized for gaming and is an atomic distro. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it, just know that for most casual users, an atomic distro makes way more sense and is much less likely to break. Additionally, if you have nvidia hardware, the drivers come pre installed so it’ll work right out of the box.

Just copy C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/ to /home/yourname/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/ and Steam will recognize those games are already present when you try to download them.

Yeah, my old desktop computer is getting turned into my first dedicated Linux machine and my current desktop isn't getting updated to 11 until October 13th.

Malware. All the malware 🪲. That thing better be airgapped.

Even JavaScript can infect you.

Assuming your family does online banking and brokerage you then become a jumping off point for malware.

I remember that "promise" too. And here we are

I really wish there was something regulatory that could be done about this. There are millions of perfectly good fully working computers that are going to go in the fucking trash because of this. I understand the desire for a TPM on every machine. It makes sense in a way. But the pure environmental impact is just indefensible. All of those computers had a significant environmental footprint to build them and ship them and again to dispose of them plus building and shipping their replacements.
If Microsoft had such a hard-on for TPM, they should have worked with computer manufacturers to make some sort of retrofit system or way of easily determining if a TPM can be added to an existing computer