Across 2 machines my start menu only opens up every other time I press the start key on my keyboard.

Known bug in windows 10 for ~ 6 years, eventually fixed in windows 11.

So anyways I used to work at MSFT, I've even stepped through the Windows Kernel source on occasion (great code base) but I'm now running Linux on my home PC because the customer obsessed company I dreamed of working for one day (and ended up working at for almost a decade) is long gone.

Does your work involves using teams or ms office or docker? I personally liked fedora, but teams pwa has a lot of missing features regularly use. Office 365 can be a replacement. Docker was a nightmare to setup especially coming to root user permissions.

Yeah Microsoft stopped fixing all non-security bugs in Windows 10 after 11 came out. Of course they also find it vitally important to use Windows Update to install ads pushing their new and exciting AI services.