It really, really sucked back then. Compiling kernels so they would actually run on my hardware, living with terrible gaming because all of the video drivers had to be reverse engineered, really crappy substitute programs that got abandoned.
Yep, went through it all.
But as a professional IT person, I saw that Windows was the number one source of spam from bots. A newly installed Windows 7 box that was exposed to the Internet would become a bot server in minutes.
Where as Ubuntu listened on zero ports with the default install.
And now, when I can run Office 365 software in a browser, when Steam has Proton and runs games reliable enough that they are making bank selling a Linux device to run Windows games, when Windows 11 is basically an app for Microsoft to spy on you and sell your data and push their spam at you...
A Linux Mint desktop, on hardware that was thoughtfully chosen, simply works.
You can say such things as generalizations but if you call out for violence specifically @graf will boot you so fast you will leave little blue Cherenkov radiation trails behind you.