When I see my wife or one of the kids going through that 15 minutes restart, I just shake my head. I run Kubuntu 20.04 on a 7 year old laptop. It’s fast as can be, takes anything I can throw at it and rarely needs to restart after an update and even when it does, it’s almost as fast and a regular restart, 15 seconds maybe. Updates can come every few days up to every few weeks and I can install them at my leisure. Never get a surprise.
Since I don’t need to run any proprietary business software, this system works for me. I do have a tablet that has windows only software on it. Auto repair info and scan tool. I run win 7 Pro on that. Win 7 Pro is a decent one. I have updates completely turned off and the tablet never connects to the internet. Runs as fast as day one because of not updating it. Windows has always tended to get slower and slower with each update. By the time it’s running at a crawl, oh look, there’s a new version of windows out. Forced obsolescence/upgrades.
I was running Cinnamon Mint on a 10 year old computer and it was ten times as fast as Windows. But the hinges were about to break and something was hitting the cooling fan so I just migrated over to a 4 year old computer.