Also: don’t trust your employees to boot into safe mode.
Trust a 3rd party to freely install system level files at any time.

I knew how to fix the computers at work today in the morning, but we couldn’t get through to the help desk to get the bit locker codes for each computer until near the end of the day.

I waited to install Linux until I put in another drive to dual-boot, and proceeded to never go back to my windows install.
I was surprised at how easy it was to get things running, and any difficulties I had were mostly the result of me assuming things were more complicated than they are and not looking for simple solutions.

I’ve been shoving a ton of .exe files into steam

I wasn’t aware that was an option. Do you have a link on how to do that?

I don’t think it even fucks the file, windows just can’t open it until you put the file extension back.