I use Win11 on my gaming rig and on my work pc by choice.
Gaming Rig (Ryzen 7 7800X3D):
Desktop environment is a slight downgrade but they are slowly reworking the whole UI. Though I really enjoy to customize my environment to my liking and probably bump more into edge cases than the average joe.
MS becomes more pushy with their subscription models but those can be ignored.
Windows Updates generally work well.
Office Rig (HP Elitebook i5 8th gen):
My laptop needed an upgrade from 8 to 16gb to run more smoothly. Same UI issues but it’s workable.
I like the new explorer though.
On my NAS/home server I use Debian 11 and am pretty happy so far.
More ram will probably not help your laptop out with performance unless your running ram intensive programs if I were you consider upgrading your boot drive if things are running slow a 8 year old ssd/hdd probably isn’t doing so good
Also if you use a hdd you could defrag it
Problem is multiple programs + web browser sucking ram.
Wirh 8GB I was continuesly red lining 95% utilization.
VoIP App, multiple tabs and windows of Chrome/Firefox/Edge (what the application is optimized for), Outlook, Teams, Spotify (to stay sane) and misc. other programs quickly suck up 8gb.
Windows often uses 8GB at idle for me with a single browser window open due to how much background BS it runs that is entirely irrelevant to anything I use the PC for. I upgraded to 32GB, then just finally decided to switch to Linux for good because it uses around 4-5GB with 10+ programs open (and most of that is Steam and Discord being inefficient).
Windows tends to use at least a quarter of system ram anyways
As long as you got enough storage for page fileing you should be aokay at least in my experience
