Generous to say Bazzite installation takes 20 minutes

Even more generous to say a Windows update takes 5 minutes

Yes, but then they would still be left with Windows

I don't really trust windows updates anymore. Sure it may fix critical security issues, but at the same time they stuff new AI BS in, roll back changes and settings I made ("set edge as default Browser?" and maybe intentionally resets registry settings that I had to make, like disable telemetry and other built in spyware.

People avoiding updating windows because of how long it takes your machine out of commission for and how opaque the process is has been a meme since like Windows XP. It's never five minutes. Plus the future hours saved not having to deal with windows bullshit.

Eighteen of those minutes were waiting for windows to shut down so they could boot the machine from usb

That is so much bullshit. Any windows update will run you 20+ minutes. My wife had not booted her windows partition for a few months, had to use it because the taxes institution in our country still runs on Excel macros or some shit, and the updates took over an hour and a half and 4 fucking restarts.

Lol 5 minutes. Now you're just making shit up.

I just set up a brand new windows laptop last night for our run ing club. Refurb straight from Dell. It downloaded updates and installed updates as part of the installation. That was easily 45 minutes. Then it booted up and it had more updates. 2 more reboots and all of those were done. 2.5 hours from unboxing to done (4:27PM to 6:51Pm).

CachyOS install is 15 minutes rounding up and it's blazing fast.

The 20 minutes was just what the installer took while I worked on other stuff. I guess if you took the time I used to download the .iso and flash the drive then it would be around 30.

I guarantee that I still got that done quicker than even the first round of Windows updates / restarts on that old hardware that hadn't been booted for 3 years.

I also find that updating bazzite is pretty quick. It's nothing compared to the Windows bootloop of nonsense. Also that machine doesn't have TPM so I would have been out of support soon on 10 with no way to go to 11.

It's still perfectly capable hardware that can run a lot of games. I see no reason to yeet it into the trash or run an insecure / unsupported OS because Microsoft told me to.