I am saying this as a very long time Linux user, and it saddens me. Politics aside, from a pure technical, functional, privacy and UX perspective, the case for changing over from Windows has been apparent for several decades.

If you picked XFCE as your front end you get WinXP functionality, with the nice things from win10/11 (start menu search that's actually local only, multiple desktop workspaces, and graphical settings/updates I've only needed to go to command line twice in four years).