On my works laptop I had initially kept the corporate windows install on the original drive and installed Fedora on a second non drive.

I would fire up the windows machine once every other week for a few hours so it gets its updates. But every single time I would enter the firmware settings or boot Fedora the OS bootlocker would lock itself and force me to go to https://aka.ms/recoverykey to get a recovery key the next time I booted windows. Until one day it started not booting even after giving the correct key. Bitlocker basically bricked itself.

So don't tell me that windows is more usable. And this is even without tackling the non functionning parts of windows when it accepts to boot, like the broken keyboard for anyone not using english language that Microsoft never even tried to fix in more than 30 years. People used to laugh about a sliding date for linux to be "read for thr desktop" but windows has never been ready either.

Now, assume your hourly consulting rate is $200. You would only have to spend about 40 hours of time tinkering on linux before windows would have made more sense for the time/money equation.

Frustration is another economy that I think is even more important for getting things done. How badly do you actually want to build? Maintaining morale through the hard bits of the target problem domain is usually already a struggle. Why do you want to be fighting with boot loaders, drivers and arguments on various forums on top of all of that?

Free just means it did not cost you any money, a free hammer does not also imply a free new roof or whatever you want to build with it.

Linux is a tool, men use tools, be a man and use Linux.