Did the same in 2012 with hp 2510p that had windows vista pre installed on it. I could literally brew a cup of coffee and make it halfway through while this poor boy was booting up.

Bit the bullet, installed arch and dwm. I remember my initial impressions on how fast the boot went, how silent the hdd is, how the whole things works reporting just a fraction of RAM in use(right after boot).

It was the first hands-on YAGNI experience. Windows(and macos and the likes of ubuntu) loads and starts everything it has and keeps the system busy at all times in terms of cpu, disk io, network io.

Barebone linux without beefy desktop environment was like “I boot into essentials and will lazy load anything upon request”.