Should i switch to linux? please tell me why or why not.

Given that Windows 11 won't support your device, Linux may be your only option for a supported OS.
- You can use Microsoft Activation Scripts (MAS) to activate Extended Security Updates for extra 3 years of support or upgrade to IoT LTSC for 6 years
  https://massgrave.dev/windows10_eol
  
  Meh. That assumes that games and applications bother still supporting it when EoL for most people has passed. Good option, though.
  Linux will continue to support their hardware for easily another decade.

Linux probably wouldn't make your games any faster, but it could make the OS feel snappier.
Reasons to switch:
you hate Windows
you like to customize stuff
you're curious about Linux
you don't play many MP games
you tend to leave a ton of stuff open, which makes things run slowly
saving 40GB or so of space means the world to you (Linux is pretty lean)
Reasons not to switch:
you need Windows-specific software, like Adobe stuff or games w/ anti-cheat
you're not interested in tinkering at all, and having any minor issue would frustrate you
you want the best possible performance for games
Linux is better at memory and task management, generally speaking, but performance in specific apps depends a ton on the specific app, from being slightly better to being noticeable worse.
As for which Linux distro to go with, I hear good things about Linux Mint, though I don't use it myself. But honestly, look at the most popular distros and find one that looks cool to you, they're all pretty good. Ones to check out are:
Debian (or Linux Mint Debian Edition) - ol' reliable, may have some issues on newer games
Fedora - tries to be close to bleeding edge, without as many sharp edges
Bazzite - gaming focus, tries to imitate Steam OS
openSUSE Tumbleweed - my personal daily driver, though I generally don't recommend it for new users since there's not a huge community to find help
There are tons more great ones. If you list your must-have apps/games, maybe someone can give a better recommendation, though honestly most distros are similar enough that if it works on one, it'll work anywhere.
- Just a point about phrasing but pretty much all MP games work flawlessly, just not the esports titles with draconian anticheats.
  
  Sure, my point is anti-cheat, which is a pretty common feature of MP games, at least the popular ones. But yeah, I could've been more clear, thanks for the correction.
- Debian (or Linux Mint Debian Edition) - ol’ reliable, may have some issues on newer games
  Used to, in the first year after Steam Linux client released, because of old libc. But since then, I've had only one or two games not work because of nvidia drivers not being new enough.

Yes, from my personal experience:
It'll be a lot faster.
Edit: there's ollama-cuda on the repos and alpaca-ai on the AUR, but I changed from the self managed to use the local ollama server. For games, there's lutris, wine-cachyos, proton-cachyos, dxvk-mingw-git and vkd3d-proton-mingw-git all on the repos, so dxvk and vkd3d (the translation layers from directx to vulkan) are updated when the system is updated, but need to be installed with the provided scripts to work automagically after that.

Just dual boot. Boot in to Linux only for a week or two, if it's working for your needs keep it. If not, delete the partition and it's like nothing ever happened.
- I wouldn't even go that far. Boot to a live USB of a distro you want to try.
  
  That often doesn't give you the actual feeling of using it as a daily driver.
- Dual boot is the way.
  
  Microsoft/Windows has a habit of messing up for Linux in despite being on separate partitions. I've experienced:
  overwrite existing grub
  write its boot sector on a disk it didn't identify (was part of a software raid setup... So that was fun)
  acquire a lock on devices and not release it even when restarting, so on Linux the "WiFi adapter suddenly doesn't work". -... Probably more.
  IMO, try out a live USB. Dual boot if you want. But as soon as you can, ditch windows entirely.
- Just dual boot.
  They'd "just" have to do a lot of potentially hazardous work for a beginner, shrinking their Windows partition to make room for another partition.
  Nah, VM is the way. Try it out, see what flies.

You can bypass the TPM requirements for windows using Rufus to get Windows 11. There are tons of videos on how to do that.
That being said, I use Linux as a daily driver and love it. You can always test it out on a USB and decide if you want to install it. It won't run games well from a USB, but it at least will allow you to see what you like.
Either way good luck with your adventure and if you have questions this community is spectacular and really likes to help people!
- My biggest problem right now it picking a linux destitution or os. There's so many how do i choose?
  Also if anyone is wondering this machine is a overpriced prebuild i got because my parents forced me to pick a prebuild instead of building a pc.
  
  A lot of folks will recommend Mint as the first option, since it's pretty straightforward and will feel a lot like older editions of Windows. Personally, I use Fedora Plasma, because it feels like what Windows 11 should have been, and it supports just about everything I've thrown at it. It's got pretty broad support, so it's easy to get into.
  
  And there’s the issue. Guy is confused, and everyone is recommending him ten thousand distros. We need to understand that not everyone understands half of what we talk about more than half the time.
  OP: just get mint, try it out, make a thread again in a couple months if you need help choosing another distro.
  
  I'm using Nobara and Fedora. I think Mint is the most popular.
  Check out distrowatch.com it explains it well.
  
  Choosing a distro is both very easy and very hard. The easy answer is go with the flow, look for what the most popular distros are and see what appeals from those. A common distro will have lots of other people with the possibility of having the same issues you have finding solutions. It makes troubleshooting way easier and is worth the distro not being perfect if you can get more support.
  The hard answer is don't choose a distro. Try distros. Maybe before killing your Windows install get VirtualBox and install various distros in VMs and try them out. Performance is fairly good in a VM so you can get a realistic idea if how it will work for you in terms of how intuitive it is to find things, how the workflow is, and whether it is too opinionated about how things are done.
  For example, Ubuntu has a little less ability to control things at a deep level, but it is more supportable because everyone using it either does or does not have a given problem.
  At the other end is something like Arch which is more of a base than a distro. You choose your desktop environment, what services you want, all the back ends, and you have to configure it yourself.
  I would recommend EndeavourOS as a great Arch based distro.
  
  All that matters is that you pick something popular enough that you can easily Google any issues that might arise.
  
  Linux takes like 5-10mins to setup. You can dedicate your first day/week to trying out a few different flavors to see which one you like.
  I'd try distro's in this order Mint with Cinnamon > fedora KDE > Ubuntu Gnome > cachyOS if you're a baller > Arch if you want to learn and break things while doing it > NixOS if you absolutely hate having things work easily and learning transferable knowledge.
  
  The big ones for general use are Ubuntu and Fedora. KDE is gonna feel most windows like on any distro.
  If you want something security focused there's quebesOS that breaks everything out into VMs. For gaming there's bazzite which is just modified fedora and several other gaming spins like steamOS.
  
  Do you have HDR monitors? If you do and care about having the HDR part working, you'll likely want to pick one that uses KDE Plasma for the desktop environment.
  
  Just pick something. They are all free (nearly all of them), so you can always install something else pretty easily. Spend some time to get your feet wet and get the lay of the land. After a week or two, you'll probably have a really good direction on what you actually want. You can also run them as live oses, so download a few with different Desktop Environments you think are interesting and test them out. Then install one.
  
  There’s a lot of good suggestions here and I wanted to add pop os! it’s a beginner friendly Linux distribution but with more of a focus on gaming.
  
  I'm still going to ask how you ended up with a server CPU. Does it help with the tasks you do?

Lots of mention of dual booting- I recommend getting an e-waste tier 256gb SATA SSD for your first Linux install if you just want to try it out.
No one wants those old drives because they are small but they are plenty quick and you only need 15 to 30 gigs for most distros.
- I second this. Chances are high that OP ends up reinstalling multiple times (either to check out multiple distros or after they accidentally nuked the system). Doing so on a separate SSD so they don't accidentally wipe their data during reinstall and so they don't have to constantly migrate data is a good plan.
  
  Third this move. Nvme are under $20 cheap way to experiment
- I picked up a Samsung m.2 280 or 260 gb guy on eBay for like ten bucks. I don't remember the size exactly, just that it wasn't the normal binary 256gb.
  
  They sell 250 on 256 and 500 on 512, holding back the 6/12 gigs for wear leveling and other NAND management functions. At least that's what I understand.
- Can you use the existing Windows partition for the games though (without it fucking them up)? Because while Linux fits in that easily, games do not.
  
  Linux has NTFS drivers. Should work fine.
  
  Probably not, just trying to save the guy a few bucks. Try some games one at a time that do fit, and rely on protondb for the ones that don't. Then decide to move over and wipe windows.

64 GB DDR3, interesting. That's a lot for that old tech.
- It's a Xeon, workstation and server CPU, so made to take a lot of RAM, 4 memory channels.
  
  Still a lot for that old tech and a desktop gaming computer.
  For a server, it's not a lot.
- Doesn't the E5 2690 support up to 512GiB LRDIMM? Pretty sure my 2697v2 do.
  
  🤷‍♂️

Note how the 3060 already had 12GB VRAM, and they still try to push 8 today

Your biggest issue is going to be dealing with multiple partitions, unless you can find another boot disk, because your disk is pretty full. I would strongly recommend getting a second disk, unless you are willing to delete a lot of (presumably) game executables.
It is also a good idea to have a relatively smaller Linux partition, and point your Steam library and other documents to a separate data partition. My 1TB nvme has 150MB EFI FAT32 partition, a 100GB ext4 root partition (Linux is installed here), and the remaining ~900GB as my ext4 data partition. This way, if you choose to install a different Linux, or blow away your root partition, you can relink your Steam/Music/Video Libraries and local AI models, and get up and running again very quickly.
Outside of the disk, my top recommendation is to archive your active steam games, so you can restore them into Linux without fully re-downloading later. Additionally, unless your games are in Steam Cloud, you will also have a bit of a time restoring save files to the new OS, as the file paths will be different than you are used to on Windows.
My second recommendation is to ensure secure boot is disabled in your BIOS; there are currently known issues with driver signing with the NVIDIA driver.
Finally, assuming you’re on a Ubuntu-based distro like Mint, ensure you install Steam from the .deb or apt package, not the flatpak. On Mint, “Install Steam” is available right in the start menu.

I feel like if you're asking on this community, you've already decided you want to switch and you want help being reassured that it's viable

Load onto USB thumb drive and boot into it to see if you like the outline feel. Try different ones (Debian is good)
Dual boot If you like outline feel from USB drive
Give it a month as your daily driver
Consider the Chris Titus option of thinned down windows.
I'm using Debian on my machine and it just works.
- Mint is better IMHO, it’s based on Ubuntu which is in turn based on Debian, but includes quality of life improvements and newer packages. Debian is nice for servers, but I would get something that is stable but still has faster updates for my desktop

The answer: Yes!
The why: Why not?

Try it! You can always go back.
If you can find another HDD or SSD then you can keep your windows drive full of games intact.
I dual booted for years (for gaming) and as of now haven't used a non-linux PC for more than a decade at home or professionally.
I recommend starting with either Fedora or Ubuntu as they're among the most popular and have a large community for support.
Set yourself a goal on Linux, even if it's just "check my email" or whatever. Rinse, repeat.

A xeon plus 3060 is an interesting combo...
- He probably slapped the GPU onto a workstation.

As long as you back up your data, experiment to find what you want. If you have an empty spare drive, try out the different options there. It's been a month since I moved to Bazzite. My plan was to try Mint and Bazzite while also keeping a Windows 10 ISO in my boot drive (Ventoy will allow you to have as many ISO in your USB stick). If things get too difficult, I could always go back to Windows 10. But using Bazzite has been a breeze, I decided I didn't even need Mint. Every time I think I need to open up the terminal for any issues, I find that the solution doesn't require it.

Of course you should.

yes

It's equally a pro and a con but for me it's a huge pro:
You can know exactly what your computer is doing because it will tell you!!
You can see highly verbose logs, granted it's not easy to interpret without the necessary skills but Chatgpt doesn't mind it if you dump 100 lines into a print and just say "fix my shit", I do that routinely. I hated how windows would just freeze up and flash a popup like "Program not working" and I have to guess what's going on by gauging the feeling of the software. I want exactly what I want to happen and Linux just does it without fighting me

You've already got plenty of comments explaining why you should switch. You obviously should ideally. Check Protondb.com to see if your games runs on Linux.

Other people have given you good responses about switching so I'll give some distro recommendations:
Bazzite. This is what I use on fairly similar hardware. Looks like you've got a v1 or v2 chip as it's still DDR3, I'm on an E5-2680v2 and it works great under Linux while Windows 10 just caused it to freeze up so much by the end. All the background updates and indexing and whatever else were such resource hogs. The NVIDIA Bazzite iso also includes the official drivers out of the box, which many other distros don't (looking at you Linux Mint!!). It's designed to be super easy for gamers newly switching from Windows, with Steam pre-installed and everything just ready to go.
CachyOS. I don't have personal experience with it, but I know it also includes the official NVIDIA drivers out of the box, and it's designed as a gaming distro first and foremost as well.
Nobara. Another gaming distro, it also includes the NVIDIA drivers and is ready to go. It's made by a dev known as Glorious Eggroll who is well respected in the linux gaming community.
The reason I recommend distros that have the official NVIDIA drivers OOTB is that they work much, much better than the Noveau open source driver that most traditional distros (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora) include. The offical drivers also have a steep learning curve for a new Linux user to install themselves, it's nowhere near as simple as installing them on Windows.
- I like bazzite but the immutable aspect makes downloading some thing even more complicated for a newb. Truly can never go wrong with zorinos or mint
  
  That's exactly why I'm recommending it. For a user that just wants to game, it has the guardrails in place to stop them from bricking their install. Think about how comparatively hard it is to severely mess up a Windows install.
  There are plenty of other ways to install software, Bazzite highly recommends Flatpak and AppImage. As well, if you do really need anything else, it can be run in a Distrobox and there are plenty of people on the forums who can help with that.
  Recommending Mint to users that just want to game, that don't want to learn technical stuff, needs to die. Sure, if someone comes in and says they're happy to learn tech stuff, Mint is a great option. But for everyone else, something like Bazzite is just so much closer to "it just works". Hell, I have technical skills, headless Debian over SSH is my happy place, but I have Bazzite on my desktop and handheld because I can't mess with it. It's always ready to game when I am!
  
  I've been using Linux for 25 years and I kinda hate how clunky immutable Fedora is.
- Sandy Bridge is too old for CachyOS. Cachy compiles the kernel with optimizations for newer CPUs
  https://wiki.cachyos.org/installation/installation_prepare/
  
  Wrong, I'm running a sandy bridge on cachyos right now
  
  If you look at recommended requirements on that page, it suggests the x86_v3 but minimum doesn't. It's a little confusing but the following section seems to just be explaining that term for the recommended level? If I'm wrong though I'll gladly cross it out.

Switch when Microsoft ads, bloat, telemetry and reboots starts to test your sanity. Didn't switch if everything seems fine.

If you feel like trying something new, why not try it? Worst case scenario you’re just changing to a different OS anyway. Best case scenario you find something new to learn and tinker with.
- They don't have to wholesale switch, dual-booting is an option.
  
  True

Your choices:
buy a new PC with Windows 11
move to linux with your current PC
stay with Windows 10 on your current PC, and take the risk of using an insecure system.
- You missed one:
  build/buy a new PC and put Linux on it
  
  Could be the same as option 1 using dual boot.

If you have to ask someone else whether you should switch then you should not switch.

If you game and use ollama and want to try Linux I think you should check out Bluefin-DX as it is specially tooled for Nvidia AI nim and nemo container environment. Nvidia drivers are ready to go.
As for your CPU choice, if you can at some point get over to at minimum 12thgen Intel (11thgen I you're willing to jump onto ali express ewaste) I think you would see a marked performance improvement overall.

You know the answer!
Exactly, that's it.
So why not do it?

If you want to know my honest opinion then instead of focusing on the operating system you should focus on the hardware. An old inefficient low-clocked six core server CPU is no match for a RTX 3060.
- Linux could still make a significant improvement in responsiveness or performance. Especially with something like Cachyos.

Yes

i cut my teeth on linux mint with cinnamon before moving to garuda dragonized. it was my daily driver for the last four years, then i switched to proxmox and just run everything on VMs 🤷
lots of resources and documentation available for mint, but it's pretty turnkey. best advice i'd give to a newfriend is make sure you read any articles or documentation start to finish, instead of trying to follow along. also, employ good backups practice: learn what timeshift/snappy is, how it works, and how to use it.
taking a backup before making big changes has saved my ass more than once

~~CachyOS might get you some modest performance gains on that hardware~~
*edit, see reply
I have a similar usecase w/ games and ollama, good support for that on linux
- Sandy Bridge is too old for CachyOS. Cachy compiles the kernel with optimizations for newer CPUs
  https://wiki.cachyos.org/installation/installation_prepare/
  
  thanks good catch

Nvidia is a bit of a risk under Linux. It might work.
- There’s hardly any risk anymore. The drivers themselves are mostly fine, with a couple exceptions.
  The only two risk factors are either using an immature distro with no properly packaged drivers, or an outdated one
  
  Yep, for example Ubuntu took like 4 extra months to get a late enough driver to fix the Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth texture issue. Completely unplayable until I believe driver 570.123. I had the updated driver pretty early on Arch, but wouldn't ever suggest that to someone casually considering switching.
  
  Mint won't properly display games with my RTX 3080 unless I reboot for some reason. There can still be issues but they might be fixable.

Manjaro xfce. There is ollama if you want.

Iirc Intel xeon is shitty, installing linux might make your overall experience with your computer better. Especially if you run something like xfce as the desktop environment.
- Xeon are just server SKUs, nothing wrong with them.
  
  oooh, i had them confused with celerons