Well I have had to setup dual-boot on my new desktop. I can't get acceptable graphics performance for the two Windows only CAD packages I run under VMWare. Did a number of tweaks and fine tuning but it is still unusable for anything work related. VMWare really needs to work on their graphics driver and do a better job at instruction translations, or even better make use of direct draw which the host drivers support.

I added a second 512GB NVMe SSD as a dedicated drive and installed Windows 10 Pro. This was to ensure that Windows didn't break my Linux boot and to help isolate the two OSes.

I have to say I am unimpressed with Windows 10 install process and even more with initially setting it up and using it. Their install is probably fine if you simply want to run a scripted process with no deviations. However if you want to adjust things like partitioning or controlling when/how updates are done you have to jump through hoops. They also make it more complicated than necessary for dual boot, but that is another fight and not unexpected.

I know there are lots of people that love Windows 10, I however am not one of them. I find it invasive and I am spending more of time fighting it and what Microsoft thinks I should be doing than what I actually need to do. When I have to pay for products like this I do expect them to actually be a benefit to me and not a hindrance.

Overall comparing Windows 10 Pro with Ubuntu 18.04.2 I find Linux to be far better overall. It boots faster, shuts down faster, handles updates MUCH more seamlessly and with almost no visible impact on the performance while doing so. Most of my applications run under Linux (I don't use Wine). I have a LOT more flexibility in getting the system to behave for what I want.

Don't get me wrong, Linux has is not perfect either. Ubuntu's use of gnome 3.28 has some issues but I have been able to tweak those. Out of the box I had probably 75% of what I wanted, then with some tweaking and adjustments I have closer to 95% of what I want.

I had considered possibly running Windows 10 as my primary OS since I need it anyhow for the CAD packages and just run Linux on top or in a VM. But I am however not happy with the user experience at all. So it looks like I will only be using Windows when I have to leverage those two CAD packages and switch over to Linux for everything else. This is inefficient when I would like to leverage other tools at the same time when I am in the CAD packages but unless I can tweak the user experience better in Windows this how it will stay - Windows ONLY for two CAD packages and booting between them.

At least the boot times are low with the NVMe SSDs so switching takes less than a minute. It is however an inefficient way to work when I need to leverage several packages at once.

After encountering some intermittent issues (startup and crashing) with my old system that are indicative an impending device failure I decided it was time to upgrade my old system. The old system was starting to show its age with some of the work I do. It was a i7-3770K at 3.5GHz (4 cores/8 threads) with 32GB of RAM (DDR3-1333), with 500 GB SSD, 256 GB SSD, and 2 X 1TB HD in a RAID1 array. Last year I had done an upgrade on the video card to an Nvidia GTX-1060 6GB.

The new system is using an i9-9820X at 3.3GHz (10 cores/20 threads) with 32GB (DDR4-2666) of RAM (an additional 32GB is on order). The boot drive is a 500GB NVMe SSD (I may add a second later since there is a slot for it). I moved the Nvidia GTX-1060 over to the new system and will be moving the old drived over also for additional storage once I finish ensuring everything is running properly on the new system.

I have also decided to change my primary operating system. The old system ran Windows 7 Pro and a number of VMs under Vmware Workstation. Since I wanted to avoid Windows 10 and its privacy invasions the new system is running Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS and will run a Windows 7 Pro VM along with others. I have already verified that the graphics performance of the several CAD packages I run that are exclusively Windows only is good on the new system under the VM.

I still have lots of work to do getting things tweaked and all setup on the new system but so far am quite impressed. The performance of the new processor is great. The NVMe SSD performance is amazing and really improves the VMs for some operations. I am actually getting better overall performance in the CAD packages on the new Windows 7 VM than the old desktop had running natively.

So far the only real problem I have had was with Microsoft and how they handle validating the Windows 7 license.