“The most damage we have experienced came “courtesy” of Microsoft.”
ABSOLUTELY. I discovered that back in the very beginning. I caught on to MS greed back when CPUs and bus speed started to get faster. As soon as MS realized hardware was getting faster they purposely stole all that extra speed for themselves with unneeded bloat. Almost as if it was on purpose. Still windows loads almost as slow as it did back when we were using 386 processors. And they have been doing it all along.
Nope, not doing it for any reason or need. I can live without a computer before I ever do that again.
This actually gets worse as time goes on. The clean install I did on my wife's old laptop loads Windows 10 in 30 seconds or so. She put very few programs on it outside of Office and a few solitaire and “fishdom” type games and it was still taking minutes to start up.
The experience of upgrading to Windows 11, scrapping that and then putting fresh installs of Windows 11 and then finally a fresh install of Windows 10 was a hellish experience. I have been through these many times before, but it keeps getting worse. Windows 10 now installs about 50 updates after a fresh install from the latest iso from their website. It takes multiple restarts and often the updates get stuck and after an hour or so you have to shut things down and go through much of it over again. Windows 11 is not quite as bad as Windows 10 since it is only about 3 years old.
Either way, installing Linux is typically much less of a pain... until you decide to try and make some type of modifications which can involve a bunch of command line scripts and commands.