You’re going to hear a lot of people saying how straight forward Windows is install; I’m avoiding W11 so have my W10 anecdote.

The only way I’ve ever been able to install W10 is to disconnect every single peripheral except m/kb and one single drive.

Anything else over the years, be it different mobos, HDD,SSD m.2 thingies it’s always been the same; anything more than m/kb and one single disk W10 shits the bed.

If you’re still struggling, try that.

All good choices, but seeing no love for KDE Connect?

Yup same here. Two profiles, one is my daily driver and open source, they other is for the few apps I need with Google services. This is the perfect compromise between what I want, and what I need.