A cracked version of W10LTSB with most of the cruft stripped out and updates/AV disabled is genuinely the best base computing experience. My WWAN card even works properly. Linux is happy inside a VM, and the host computer works properly without spending a billion hours recompiling drivers with every kind of weird lab hardware, GPUs, FPGAs, and it's own internals etc. If something is better supported on Linux I just pipe it into the VM.