Point is, shady resellers make you pay 20-30 bucks, official stores make you pay even more, with Linux you pay nothing.

Now onto the Windows issues:

Crazy system requirements. You can bypass them, but the real question is: why do you have to even bother bypassing them in the first place?

Crazy resource usage. You can debloat Windows with something like CTT’s winutil, but the resource usage still isn’t close to the heaviest Linux desktop (GNOME).

Telemetry aka data collection, also called spying in some circles. You can disable most of it with the aforementioned winutil, but even then you can’t be sure that it was all stripped out.

Ads. Again, most, but you can never be sure if all, have been removed with third party tools.

And can I just ask: why do you even have to bother with using extra third party tools to do all that? In Linux, it comes disabled out of the box, and most of it doesn’t even exist.

Worse install process. It takes much longer, you have to go through workarounds to ensure you can bypass the forced usage of a Microsoft account. The install and setup process, from booting the iso, to logging into your installed system takes longer on Windows (I’ve had it take about 30 minutes sometimes, while a typical Linux install would take about 10-15 minutes)

Choice. You don’t like the default Windows-like paradigm? How about a MacOS-like one, or a completely unique one? You want something that has very few customisation options (Cinnamon, GNOME), or something extremely customisable (KDE Plasma, Standalone Window Managers like Openbox, AwesomeWM, Qtile etc.)

Customisability. You don’t like the default window decorations? Or your bar? You want it to be a floating dock, you want it on one side, or at the top? You want to use a tiling window manager, with their extreme customisability? You can do all that on Linux. There are projects that attempt that on Windows, but they are just gimmicks at the end of the day, because gou can’t actually replace the proper Windows shell. Technically, you could do it in the past, but all of these projects are basically dead and none of them offer tiling so…

Freedom. Linux isn’t just free as in beer, it is also free as in Freedom. Thousands of volunteers work tirelessly on the various projects that come together to male up your distribution of choice. And most of them do it for free because they like the project and more often than not, because they use it themselves.

Security. Even out of the box, if you are to compare the list of vulnerabilities for Windows and Linux systems, you will find multiple remote code execution, and iirc, privilege escalation vulnerabilities on Windows. This means that if an attacker wanted to, they could execute malicious code as admin remotely, without ever touching the system.

Exclusive features. You might have heard that only in the last few years, Microsoft has started to include things like a decent terminal experience, the winget package manager, full disk encryption, tabs in the file manager, etc. all of which are features that have existed on Linux for years, if not decades. There are some that still keep on making their way on Windows, when they have existed for many years on Linux, such as floating taskbars (which is apparently coming to Windows 12), while some features (like Changing the position of the bar) are actually being removed on Windows!

I’m sure there’s more but that’s all I can think of, off the top of my head.

Edit: I forgot, No forced updates. Apparently MS is now forcing updates. Link: https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-to-force-push-23h222h2-update-as-windows-11-21h2-end-of-support-date-nears/

No such thing on Linux. There are updates. You want to apply them? Okay, go on. You don’t? Okay, that’s alright too.

And something else: you don’t have to reboot. You only have to reboot on Linux if you are doing a kernel upgrade. If you’re upgrading anything else, it’s perfectly fine.

They were just specifying good prebuilds. The only hardware that would cause problems would be niche proprietary parts on laptops and prebuilds. All custom-builds will work fine the large majority of the time.

There are plenty of completely community run distros. I’m not trying to make you switch to Linux, just pointing out that your reasoning wasn’t right. If you’re comfortable and don’t care about FOSS, privacy, ownership of your OS, etc., then Windows is fine.