>> and times when GRUB suddenly decided not to boot
I suspect you are dual-booting, which is itself a hacky middle ground full of bugs. Linux and windows will never share a drive well.
>> reduced laptop battery life
??? Odd. I find battery life on my laptops far better on linux, generally because linux knows how to actually stop doing things when asked. Windows, no matter what you do, will randomly decide to install/download something.
>> general UI clunkiness,
For me, the fact that linux UIs don't change every few months, and when they do I can undo them, makes window the clunkier UI. It is monday morning here. I have so far had to restart Outlook twice on my work computer as new "updates" are applied. I'd take a thousand clunky-looking widow borders over MS's daily popup pollution of my screen time.
> Linux and windows will never share a drive well.
Nowadays with UEFI and GPT, sharing a drive is not a problem; they don't stomp on each other's MBR anymore and even UEFI itself comes with a boot manager.
The bigger problem is to learn about these "new" things ("new", because introduced ~15 years ago) and stop doing stupid shit that worked with legacy BIOS and is not necessary anymore. Grub breaking itself randomly is mostly self-inflicted problem.
> I suspect you are dual-booting, which is itself a hacky middle ground full of bugs. Linux and windows will never share a drive well.
The Windows installer unfortunately will happily clobber the EFI partitions on completely unrelated drives. Had it happen on a triple boot (Win/Linux/Hackintosh) setup a couple of times, with each OS getting its own drive. MS almost certainly is not testing against multi-OS setups of any kind.
I suspect you are dual-booting, which is itself a hacky middle ground full of bugs. Linux and windows will never share a drive well.
>> reduced laptop battery life
??? Odd. I find battery life on my laptops far better on linux, generally because linux knows how to actually stop doing things when asked. Windows, no matter what you do, will randomly decide to install/download something.
>> general UI clunkiness,
For me, the fact that linux UIs don't change every few months, and when they do I can undo them, makes window the clunkier UI. It is monday morning here. I have so far had to restart Outlook twice on my work computer as new "updates" are applied. I'd take a thousand clunky-looking widow borders over MS's daily popup pollution of my screen time.