I've been using Windows since before Windows 3 and Linux since Red Hat 4 or 5. I've had plenty of crashes, but work-losing crashes? I sincerely can't remember a time where I've lost much work, if any, on my workstations.
In the last decade, I've hardly had any crashes at all in Windows. Maybe one or two. In the last 3 years of running Manjaro Linux on 3 different workstations though, I can honestly say that I haven't had one crash. I've had power outages, minor bugs (once or twice) and some problems that I've caused myself, but zero operating system crashes. I've tried other desktop distros many times before this, but this is the first one that never crashed on me. Last time I setup a Xubuntu desktop, an update made it unbootable within 2 weeks. So if you're not using a distro based on Arch yet - I can understand your frustration.
I've easily had way, way more problems, crashes, limitations and annoyances with macOS in the past decade than I have in the past 3 years of Manjaro Linux or Windows. Especially after each major macOS update. Software stops working and even some of my hardware never worked on it. I have Macs that refuse to recognize certain common items like USB keyboards, mice and displays.
> I didn't need to do it to try out Linux. I was trying to cheap out and use the same machine for gaming and for work, ideally without dual-booting, so Windows wasn't an option (for the work part, that is).
So, what I'm hearing is that you consider Macs to be overpriced, non-gaming machines that crash maybe every other year. Otherwise you would have just used your existing Mac or bought a new one to solve your problems. Alright well, I can admit that all three of the major desktop systems have issues. But Macs have just the worst types of issues that can't or won't be fixed because Apple will pull the rug out from you at any minute if you try to stray from their plan for further enslaving you.
Anyway, I don't see why anyone has to "choose" between one or the other. It's not expensive to have more than one computer. I have some Windows boxes for entertainment. I have some Linux machines for work and I have some Macs for iOS/Mac things.
IMO if you can't keep Windows running, you're doing something wrong and if you can't keep Linux running you're either not picking compatible hardware or you're running the wrong distro. Maybe give Manjaro a whirl and if you do, don't try and do things the way you're used to in some other distro - find out the Manjaro way of doing things first (and use their guis to do things, especially the Add/Remove Software gui - and restart when it says to) and the Arch way of doing things second and after that you can apply your existing Linux/bash/whatever knowledge.