Linux

I was in the same boat as you about 9 months ago. I switched a failing laptop over to Linux Mint Cinnamon and was blown away by how it revived that laptop. Then I dual booted my desktop to a Windows/Mint system and found myself rarely booting into Windows because I was enjoying Linux so much. About 3 months ago I wiped Windows off the machine altogether because I just found the experience toxic in comparison to Linux. The Windows automatic updates were taking about 20 minutes to install simply because I wasn't using the OS that often. Next on the cards was an ancient desktop that had been sitting in my cupboard for over 5 years. I threw a bit of memory at it and stuck Lxle on it. It now lives in my shed for playing music and browsing the web which it does rather well. It must be at least 15 years old, perhaps even 20. Yesterday I installed Linux Mint on my partner's Lenovo laptop because I was sick of her complaining about how slow Windows 10 had become. That laptop runs faster than anything in the house. She's delighted with it. There are many distros to choose from, but I can only give you my own experience. With Mint the transition away from Windows was easy and at first I didn't even use the terminal. Now I use the terminal all the time as it really gives you the power to do some extraordinary things that you could never do on Windows. As for that one piece of software I couldn't get a Linux version of? I put Windows 7 on VirtualBox and installed it on that. Not only have I learned a tonne of stuff using Linux, it's made computers interesting to me again. Next project is an ADS-B flight receiver running from a Raspberry Pi. The good thing about Mint is it boots to a live system from USB before you install it, so you can check to see if everything is running smoothly before you take the plunge. Good luck and welcome to the dark side.