Re: If they weren't removing the choice no one would bother changing
Apologies for the rant!
I jumped to Linux about 18 months ago now on my main driver at home (still stuck with Windows for work, but they provide that gear, so meh).
All my docs and media are on a NAS (with separate backup and cloud sync), so very little local that needed to be moved, so that made switching easier, for me anyway.
I didn't quite fully commit, as I set up a dual boot, with my existing Win 10 install on one drive, unchanged other than doing a clean up (uninstalling/moving stuff around to fee up other drives etc). Then a separate drive with Mint (as I was already familiar with Mint, other flavours exist). I set up Mint as the primary drive, with Windows as an option via GRUB. But I found, other than booting into Windows to grab some settings or something like that on the odd occasion, that I quickly just stopped using Windows. (Also helps that you can mount NTFS drives as read/write with a single click in Mint (and I assume other flavours), so if all I needed was to grab a file, I can do that from within Linux anyway).
I've been using Mint now for ~18 months, I really can't imagine ever going back to Windows on any personal machine. I don't miss it at all.
A few things I don't miss :
Random slow boot times.
So called background updates or tasks that hog your system for a while (I kept a reasonably clean system).
System updates that seem to take forever even though it's a quick system [*]
Reboots required after even small updates.
The 'update and shutdown/restart' thing, that even when told to update and shutdown, still carries on patching at the next boot up! Time to go get a coffee I guess.
Ads in the Start menu.
Really bad Start menu search system, that keeps pushing Internet results and ads on me (again!). (I turn it off, it then comes back after an update!).
Suggestions, of any sort (it's like Clippy all over again!)
Applications/programs having to be manually updated (I love having a common Software manager and update system now!).
I could go on!
I hadn't realised until I switched, just how many things that are just a normal part of using Windows, are just not a thing, or are less of a hassle, under Linux. To some extent, I hadn't realise just how bad Windows had gotten, until I took that leap, and looked at it from the outside!
Obviously different people will have different use cases, different software needs etc. So millage may vary!
The point is, for me anyway, I have no regrets in jumping to Linux.
And just to be clear, Linux isn't perfect. For example I switched to a different Mesa (GFX driver) as the version in the Mint repo is a bit behind (they go for stability, not cutting edge), and so some newly released games just crashed on start, and this took a bit of digging, and a couple of attempts to get working!
Oh, and I'm also a PC gamer, playing a mix of legacy (C&C, Sword of the Stars, KotoR etc), and newer titles (Horizon Forbidden West, Fallout 4, Starfield, Cyberpunk 2077 etc). All work fine on Linux (sometimes better, especially for older titles such as those written for Win 7 etc).
For ref:
* System: Ryzen 5800X3D, 6900XT, 32GiB RAM, 3 x NVME M.2 drives, one for Windows, one for Mint, and one for my Steam Library :-)