At the time, I installed slackware with a lot of floppies.
Now, after trying quite a few, I settled on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. It has one of the best KDE desktops, and basically just works, whatever you do with it. It’s comfortable and boring which I see as great qualities.
I switched to Linux from Windows 3.11 because Microsoft software didn’t do what it was supposed to.
My method is that I don’t even know what’s available for Windows, so I don’t miss it at all. The opposite isn’t true though, and time spent in a Microsoft environment can quickly become painful.
My only regular contact with Windows is the Steam partition which hasn’t been used for quite some time. I have a laptop that has a small win11 partition that I boot every now and then to see what they’re up to these days.
However, in the end, the only real answer is that if you really need a piece of software, you just run whatever system that supports it. It’s not a religion, you use whatever is convenient for you at a given time.