I have been daily driving a dual booted laptop for the past two years. After a year of distro hopping I settled with fedora + kde and never looked back. I really liked the auto nvidia driver config and it made everything so pleasant to work. Since the last 8 or 9 months I decided to do gaming using bottles and proton ge. I cannot afford to buy games and bottles is a God send at that. Now I realized that I had not logged into my windows partition in over 6 months. So I logged in to check and it told me it needs to download 8 gigs of updates. That sent me into rage and so clean installed everything to be fedora. I have 250 gb of storage locked in limbo because of windows( I have a 512 gb ssd so it was a lot) and today after everything was setup, the os took only around 20gb minus the games. Never felt happier.
I remember when I did the switch in 2008 and never looked back. I had a similar experience where across a few years I have been trying different distributions and finally settled on Lubuntu. Years have passed and different machines as well. Now my main driver is a Steam Deck with his Arch based OS and a secondary pure Arch on a sd card for more specific tasks.
Linux made my life more comfortable and relaxed, without even mentioning secure. My family uses Linux now, Windows is long dead.
We are free.
I actually set up Linux on my family machine 1 year ago and they don’t even notice since all they need is a browser and vlc. So they have been daily driving Linux longer than me :)
This is the way. Dealing with the significantly fewer problems they have is easier too. Most things I can ssh in without even touching the computer and fix the issue from my laptop.
I wasn’t far behind you. My first laptop around that time came with Vista installed. Didn’t take long for me to switch Ubuntu after that, haven’t been back to Windows since.