I'm debating throwing Linux on my desktop instead of 8.1.

I'll end up going that direction eventually, so kinda like what I did going from XP to 7 in 2012... why not just take the plunge early? I actually bought a second SSD for easier booting. Worst case, if things don't pan out, I guess I could always slap the drive into my laptop. It's faster than the one currently in there, after all!

(With that said, part of me debates putting a larger / faster SSD in there anyway... except I don't really use it heavily enough to warrant it anymore, sadly.)

There was actually a while when my laptop was my main machine. It pretty much overpowered anything else in the house, and it ran OS X to boot! (This was, of course, back when 10.6 was king and 10.7 was pretty new.) Nowadays, OS X is... an indifferent thing, really. It feels like all the soul it had has been sucked out, and it's just an expensive alternative now.

...But it's still better than Windows 10.

the Everdrive is coming in soon and being able to play romhacks on real hardware is super enticing. oh man