I’ve been running Linux on my computers for 5 years.
I've run Debian Linux with short detours into Ubuntu and Mint since 2000. Worked a little with Red Hat before that.
It used to be hard to get stuff working, if you had funky hardware. Hardware support is much better now.
I retired the first one when it was physically broken, but it was 8 years old.
I'm routinely using stuff that's at least that old. Stuff with Win 7 licenses on it. As long as I have at least a dual core CPU, can bump the ram to 8GB, and install a solid state drive, it's good for my purpose.
It was a bit of a challenge to set this computer as a dual boot, but the instructions to do it were pretty clear.
As long as you start with the Windows install, on a reduced size partition, it's easy.
What's fun is, a dual boot system with properly encrypted file systems on the Linux side. Not so trivial.
I met Linus when he was working on his first kernel. Later I would build one of the first Linux based servers after doing so on platforms like SCO. EISA boards, experimental I/O cards and 16 or so drives. Great stuff then, great stuff today.