I'm not sure exactly why, but everything is just quicker on Linux on my current machine.

I experienced the same a few years ago, both on desktop PCs and on laptops too, when I used Ubuntu Linux. Nowadays I use a HP 15s laptop with Windows 11. I have not tried Linux on this so far. By the way, lightweight desktop environments on Linux can also make your PC faster. So you can find a lot of difference in speed between various Linux distributions.