If doesn't work the first time try a few times

Windows sounds like it hasn’t changed much after all.

But it's little things about the desktop experience that makes me roll my eyes; like drag an icon from your desktop to your start menu. Try to change the settings on your audio device. Try to uninstall Skype and remove all of the preinstalled stuff without removing something important. Try to use the start menu search to launch an installed application.

Terminal is a great application though, very needed on Windows and the usability of things like explorer and multi monitor window management is fantastic (though MacOS does workspaces better than Windows, everything else about MacOS's window management story is garbage)

You can run Linux in a virtual machine on any OS.

WSL1 was interesting because it was a Linux compatibility layer for Windows. WSL2 is a VM that automatically provisions additional hardware and adds some paravirtualization for Nvidia GPUs.

Before WSL I was just using VMWare or VirtualBox to run a Linux instance on Windows. VSCode has the ssh extension that allowed me to develop within the Linux VM while appearing to be native.