I used Linux for around 5 years, with Arch as my distro of choice, after which I switched to Windows 11. Most of the time, I didn't face any problems - but the problems I did face sometimes took me hours and hours to solve.
And there were always issues that were basically unfixable: hibernate, battery life, security, CPU drivers, hardware acceleration etc. I say basically here, because I could have spend hundreds of hours to address some of these things, but I'd still end up with something very brittle and maintenance intensive.
Some people will immediately point out that I should have been using a more "User friendly" distro like Ubuntu, but Arch has been the most stable and easiest to maintain distro of any that I tried. With Ubuntu and its ilk, the inevitable issue would take me ages to track down, because I had to first fight my way through a dozen layers of abstraction and figure out which of the hundreds of packages was the culprit. No, a simple and minimal install has always served me best with Linux.
And yes, I tried other distros - every single major one - and I faced the same (or similar) issues in all of them.
And outside of the OS, the entire Linux philosophy seems to be as user-unfriendly as possible. Packages, because they're maintained by someone in their free time, are very barebones and need extensive configuration to function. Which is especially annoying because I constantly needed to edit config files, each one with it's own unique syntax that required multiple Google searches to discover (and rediscover if some time had passed).
With Windows, the only true issue I faced was with the telemetry. I bought an enterprise license, disabled it all, validated it with some external tools - and the problem was solved. I never saw ads, slowness or any UI/UX problems.
And the benefits were numerous, I now had access to high-quality, powerful software for free. And these programs were easily configurable and usable - no googling necessary! On Linux, I sometimes wondered how so many people could quickly create graphics and audio, because that was always an incredible chore on Linux. Now it feels like a breeze, almost as if I've been catapulted a century forward.
In fact, the reason why I switched was because there was a very insidious hardware problem that I couldn't track down on Linux, even after spending months on it. When I installed Windows on my secondary drive (to update my BIOS), I found the problem in one minute using ThrottleStop.
And security wise, Windows is also far superior. Aside from the obvious Linux vulnerabilities, Windows allowed me to spin up lightweight sandboxes with system integration to isolate browser tabs or files I downloaded. As someone that used QubesOS for some time, this really impressed me.
All in all I see no reason to go back, the only thing I miss is i3, and how it made using a single screen feel just as productive as using three.
Oh, and to be clear. The Intel driver would disable turbo boost even when the laptop was plugged in and the CPU wasn't running hot.
I had other issues when the CPU would run hot, but that turned out to be a faulty sensor triggering BD_PROCHOT. In fact, this was the issue that ThrottleStop allowed me to find and solve.
EDIT: The reason why I knew that this was a faulty sensor and not BD_PROCHOT doing its job was because I manually measured the temps on various components, each of which was completely within its normal operating temperature.
I wonder if it the root cause could be the same.