I actually belive that is what triggered this.

There was a rumour 1-2 months ago about Lenovo and Asus meeting Microsoft execs and warning them that if win11 issues continued to cost them support hours and devicw returns they would be forced to find an alternative.

I've installed Win 11 in VMs and linux on bare metal quite a few times this years.

If you count "time to unobstructed desktop + working hardware drivers", Debian beats windows by a large margin. (10 minutes vs. 1-2 hours). Also, with windows, you need to type weird crap like this into a terminal:

   & ([scriptblock]::Create((irm "https://debloat.raphi.re/")))

Debian mostly lets you avoid such stuff.