Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly! I made the same calculation 8 years ago, though now the cost Apple hardware has me reconsidering a PC with Linux for my next personal laptop.
It's a much different era than 8 years ago. I've been using Linux as my main OS for 4 years now and it's been very stable. Mind you I bought hardware that I knew would work well and did a lot of upfront work with configuration, but now its all automatic.
Linux comes with strings attached. On the other hand I had to deal with Win7 issues as well (such as the Windows Updater hogging up 50% of the processor) which weren't easy to fix either. In hindsight, it's on par. On Linux, it's easy to switch to a previous kernel, I like that really. And I use timeshift before critical updates.
The only concession I did, was to buy an HP printer recently because of HP's support on Linux.