[dcanelhas]

I wish there was an active dev community that could patch win10 going forward, but without access to source code for the kernel, perhaps that isn't really viable.

Ideally I would want to use Linux but I also want to play games that are only supported on windows.

Does using WSL help or is an outdated windows base still going to be the weakest link in the security onion?

[d3Xt3r]

WSL is unfortunately is less than ideal, not only is it rubbish (it has its own set of issues like weird networking bugs), it also doesn't mitigate any of the security vulnerabilities/bloatware/telemetry/bugs etc present in Windows.

But you can always dual-boot between Windows and Linux. Just uninstall all your browsers (to mitigate risk) and other non-essential app in your Windows install, configure the firewall to block everything except games. And boot into Linux for everything else.

[WorldMaker]

> (it has its own set of issues like weird networking bugs)

WSL2 is mostly just a virtual machine. All of its networking bugs aren't that weird, they are pretty common networking issues you'd see from any other virtual machine configuration. Depending on what you are trying to do, switching WSL2's networking mode to "Mirrored" can be a useful way to fix networking issues by more closely aligning the VM network stack with the host network stack. This is often the fix for VM networking issues in other environments, too. Things like the host's VPN get reused directly instead of the VM needing to run its own VPN copy, for instance.

[npteljes]

In case you want to hold on to Win 10, you can use their LTSC version + validate with massgrave / your own activation emulator. Win 10 21H2 IoT (LTS) end of life is 13 Jan 2032. You would have 7 years to figure out where to go from there, maybe straight to Windows 12.

[WorldMaker]

WSL is effectively a virtual machine. The weakest link is still going to be the virtual machine host (Windows).