For years I have had a hop-on/hop-off relationship between Windows and Linux. I am not and was not a Windows guy, coming from then SGIs desktops and their GUI. in the meantime I've had years of different hardware with many Linux distros (from Slackware, Debian to Suse to RedHat, Mint and many more), but also the very consistent OpenBSD and FreeBSD also as a desktop. With all these unixoids, I kept missing some of the necessary, even proprietary software, for school or my business, for which I had to run on a separate Windows box then becasue of hardware dongles. VM was not a seamless solution. The desktop applications and VMs of unixoid OSes are good, stable and fast today, hardware support is also good.
But I had the feeling that it was often only about being able to configure everything, down to the last window, and often only to use an OS without software costs. That's good, but at some point I didn't liked configuring and system administration any more. I simply wanted a system that gave me a good GUI with a unixoid shell, basically a modern BeOS/Haiku OS. Then bought a mac, a macbook, then an imac. After that I tried it out again with a Win10 box. I didn't work quite as smoothly as with macos, but it also progressed. Hardware crashes with an AMD processor and a popular collaboration suite were difficult to solve as a lecturer during the pandemic. I solved this with a quick buy of a mac mini m1 and it still runs around with sensationally low power consumption (max. 36W). Almost green;-) And now 4 hardware steps further, lets see. Mac is not that only alternative, but it is also a usable one.