You can run into some issues with missing features, for which you’ll have to manually hunt down what’s missing and manually install it.

As much as I dislike Windows, it’s incredibly uncommon for it to blue screen unless there’s some kind of hardware fault. And if it’s happening in Linux too, you’ve got bad/dying hardware.

In Linux, if your system is hanging for a bit then coming back, then it’s probably a drying hard drive.

One thing you can check with is Burn In Test on Windows. It will stress all the individual components and tell you what’s failing.

I’ll use the crappy Win11 lappy just for MS office

LibreOffice works very well. I use it often in a company that uses Office exclusively, and I’ve never had a compatibility issue.