I got myself a used notebook PC dirt cheap
A roughly eight year old Asus, aiming firmly for the bottom end of the market what with a TF screen and baked in 32GB SSD.
It came with Windows 10. Windows 10 that would insist upon downloading hundreds of megabytes of updates, unpack them into gigabyte of small files, then choke because it has run out of space. There's no option to stage things on removable media, and at shutdown or reboot it will take over the machine to apply the updates and take something like twenty odd minutes to fail to do it. Rinse and repeat. I used Windows 10 for two days and hated it so much...heh, even their own app store fails to work, telling me I must use a supported version of Windows. I think it's because even though the most recent Edge browser was installed, there's an ancient one lurking that seems to get used by preference even when you tell it to use the new one. I went from XP to 10 and the experience has been useful in demonstrating why paying little attention to Windows was a good choice.
On a whim, I downloaded Linux Mint Cinnamon and installed it on a 32GB USB stick. It's a bit quirky (even died once with a panic about killing init - no idea why, it never happened again) and has the temperament of an angry cat, but it looks nice, it's not unfriendly (even if the scroll bars are stupidly small) and it runs far better on my old machine then does Windows. I wanted the machine to run the Arduino IDE because I can't keep using an ancient app on my phone, and my XP box takes a minor eternity to build anything for the ESP32. This machine? Takes about 15-odd minutes to build the default camera server software under Windows. Under Linux? First build takes about four or five minutes. Subsequent builds of the same project take about a minute. I'm happy with that.
Suffice to say, if you don't have a dependency on a particular Windows program, try Linux as an alternative. I'm not a Linux person, I've literally been using it for about a week, but it has impressed me for all the right reasons while Windows impressed me for all the wrong ones.