There is one single app I need for freelance work that I cannot replace with a non-windows app.
It lives in a virtual machine and is shut down for 99% of its existence.
The machine that runs the VM is the one I use for local LLM and fucking around with docker containers. It’s an insanely powerful machine that’s slightly RAM constrained. I can run what feels like an unlimited amount of containers on it, or that fucking Windows VM. I have to kill every running container on the machine just to run one single Windows app for 10 minutes once or twice a week.
If my freelance work paid more, I’d buy a dedicated windows machine just to do this one fucking task. (And then I’d have to air-gap it, and figure out how to remotely start it somehow, because I don’t trust Windows at all, and don’t want it running all the time.)
Or, I guess… buy access to a windows VM online? Hm. The convenience/time/effort trade off could be worth it at certain price points.