Why is Windows?

Last night I learned that there is a workshop this Friday I'd like to attend that I would need to bring a laptop for. So today I got the old Thinkpad out to check if it'll even run the software the workshop is about. It's old, the screen's kinda bad, the battery dead, one of the SSDs is unreliable, when it gets about half full it just disappears from the system, only to be seen again if formatted (and all data lost), the trackpad is bad, the keyboard not great, in other words: it has seen better days. Or at least I hope it has, I got it used a few years ago. It's still on Windows 10, I've been meaning to put Linux on it but want to check I've gotten everything I need off of it first and it hasn't been a priority for all the aforementioned reasons. But, oh boy, is booting up Windows a pain. Notification this, "log into account"-that... "you can't uninstall that program while it's uninstaller is running", "no, you don't have permission to make the good GPU the default", "yes, I am going…