Be wary of sunk cost fallacy. Sometimes you gotta bite the bullet & allow yourself to see it as some wasted money with the opportunity to start over with something with less lock-in or the boost in creativity of now having to work with new constraints.

Have you considered running the software you need from a virtual machine inside your Linux distro?

Meanwhile the US govt:

says nothing because it has its mouth full of corporate cock

Windows 10 is over 10 years old at this point. Microsoft learned from XP It can’t live forever.

Businesses typically lease their machines for 2-3 years so they all support 11. And do you really think the government cares about regular citizens? lol.

They only switched from XP what, less than 10 years ago?

I think the hospital my mother works at was using XP for all of their computers until like 2018-2019

After switching to Mac OS I have 0 interest in using Linux on my actual conputer. I still have windows machine for work, and my servers are all Linux. But any machine I want to use is gonna run Mac.

Which ironically also requires you do buy a new device

You’re already closer to using Linux by doing so. Lots of people are unaware that macOS continues to be Certified UNIX. Many of the command line tools function very similarly to their Linux counterparts.

I wish this was true, but that’s not the reality. If things are not exactly the same, people lose any common sense they may have had.

Eh, I’d say the biggest learning curve is updates and how they’re generally password protected.

It’s actually not straightforward to a new Linux user how to bypass entering your password every time there are updates, and with how often Linux updates, this can create headaches and confusion for new users.

Especially with coming from Windows and being used to Microsoft arbitrarily forcing updates in the background. They are confused because Microsoft gave them zero control, while Linux actually gives them full control, and that can be confusing when you’re used to updates being forced on you in the background.

Linux expects you to be an adult and handle this shit, and does a lot less hand-holding for the casual user, and this can be overwhelming for some new users, because it’s a lot of extra personal responsibility they formerly didn’t have to think about. Some people just don’t have the extra mental energy to dedicate to it all.