I think the hurdle isn’t money but time, and yes it takes quite a bit of time to learn a new OS, figure out why your graphics card is running so slow, move your files to an external drive and back, find alternatives to the programs you use and learn their quirks and missing features, learn the difference between apt-get and snap and flatpak when programs only support one, figure out what a .tar.gz file is and how to install one (what was that chain of commands with “sudo make” in it), find tweaks and workarounds to get certain games working in Proton, and do that all again if you don’t like the distro (because Linux users love suggesting new distros)