Technology

Try a live USB, lets you boot into a linux flavour without needing to install it (plus has handy buttons to start a real install if you desire).

I procrastinated moving to linux for pretty much the same reason. I hated windows more and more with each passing day but wasn't excited about the part of the learning curve where I was even less effective using linux than I was at using windows.

But I was pleasantly surprised to find I didn't have to go through that stage at all. The same "discover settings" works for customizing (but it's better because linux devs don't have any metrics pushed on them by marketing or MBAs who think user goodwill and patience is infinite when they are "captured", leading to hidden or buried settings so most users just go with what MS wants).

Setup was easier, though deceptively so because I wasn't expecting the answer to "gpu drivers?" to be "already installed" and was skeptical until I had a game running. I did do a bunch of reading during the process but could have just used the defaults for most things and kinda regret some where I didn't (like snapshots are probably worth the disk space they use).

But the best part is that I haven't had to go on little "ok why the fuck is this <back to the default setting/behaving differently/addressing me without my prompting or a reason worthy of my PC interrupting me>?" adventures and wade through outdated MS help forum posts where if the problem was solved, it wasn't by the useless MS rep that seems to be struggling just to understand the words being used (indicated by copy/pasting anything that is vaguely related as a response, rather than actually addressing the question) to either figure out how to force it or give up until the next time it annoys me enough to search again.

I haven't had a single imaginary "it's my fucking computer, not yours" argument since switching and wish I had just tried sooner because it was way less friction than expected.