I just tell them that I only deal with Linux and that is usually enough to dissuade.
I haven’t used Windows personally in about 15 years and professionally in about 10. I’m pretty useless on anything newer than XP. I even got my wife to switch over to a Mac Mini because at least that has a Unix-like OS and she can still do her audio work on it (in fact, better than a Windows system because their patch QA is light-years ahead of the MS “fuck it, it’ll break some systems but we’ll get that next patch Tuesday” approach).
That’s not to say that I like Apple. I just dislike their OS less than Windows.
You have experienced the pinnacle of Windows (we could probably also add Windows 7 to this). Do yourself a favor and never touch a Windows 10 and especially Windows 11 machine. It’s unimaginable how Microsoft managed to break everything that was working and how clever they are in terms of marketing to sell you stuff you don’t need.
They made me finally switch to Linux because my paid 365 subscription offered me to try the new outlook because Windows Mail was to be discontinued in future. I activated the test and the fun began: Only one of seven accounts was imported into outlook. Of course it was the only Microsoft account (Outlook). All other Accounts were ignored. I thought „Ok migration didn’t work, I’ll do it later manually“ I had a new email. I clicked on it. Edge opened although Firefox was my standard browser. It took me a couple of seconds to realize that I was clickbaited into opening an advertisement by one of the biggest companies on this planet.
This made me immediately stop my work and install Linux Mint. I’m not going back any time soon.
For job related reasons I have to use a lot of VMs. Unfortunately most of them are Windows 10. I created a naked installation years ago and basically use this as the base for individual development VMs. One of these annoyed me for days to make an update. All I could click was „remind me in one hour“ or update immediately. So I chose the one hour a lot of times. I finally let it update. Now my (Windows default!) task bar is transparent and also the whole windows menu. A colleague using the same VM with the latest updates (without changes to installed software) has no issues.
