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.
“until you decide to try and make some type of modifications which can involve a bunch of command line scripts and commands.”
It is actually not like that anymore. Mint Cinnamon is basically Win 7 and all the GUI works well. The only time I need the command line is if I am doing something highly technical like building a personal VPN server. Everything else is just Win 7 style GUI install/uninstall. All the settings and configurations are GUI.
There is not much that needs modifying unless you actually want to edit the nuts and bolts for some highly custom use. An average user would never even need to worry about that kind of stuff because the GUI is pretty full and customizable in it’s self.
And it just works... I have one install that is nine years old and I have never even updated it once and it runs as good as the day I installed it.