I didn’t have a lot of money and went dumpster diving for parts. Changed out a bad capacitor and got a system booting. This was back in Pentium 3 and 4 days. I found a 512MB stick of memory that had some bad areas. Linux was able to map around it with some kernel options at boot. Since I had limited storage I used knoppix and had a print out of the needed kernel options and memory addresses.
Once it was up and running I was able to do anything and everything I wanted. I did built a better system and got gentoo going a year or so later.
Eventually I got gaming mostly working with the project that eventually became crossover. First software I ever purchased too. I started dual booting less.
I bounced back and forth between windows and Linux and when I built a system around 2010 I didn’t even bother configuring it for dual booting.
I haven’t really touched anything windows since around the release of Windows 10 and only used windows 7 for work reasons prior. These days I’m pretty useless with anything on that end.
So I’m an evangelical fan of Linux. I use it everywhere I can and the FOSS philosophy resonates with me. I advocate for it where it makes sense and works. I’ll go out of my way and spend time & money helping people move into it too.