Once you acquire a Compose key, you never can go back. `Compose - - -` = —. I write with curly quotes, hyphens, minuses, dashes, superscripts, Greek letters, &c. all thanks to my Compose key. (Constraining myself to ASCII is actually hard, and I only use straight quotes when it’s actually what I need, when programming.)

My last laptop ran Arch Linux; but I was willing to switch to Windows for the superb hardware that is Microsoft’s Surface Book, once WSL existed, and I knew that WinCompose existed—had either of these two items not been possible, I could not have switched to Windows.

The em-dash shortcut, system-wide remapping of CAPS LOCK to CTRL from the GUI in about 15 seconds flat, a top-level modifier key (command) that's respected enough by developers that it mostly retains its "I belong to the OS and, therefore, to the user, not to you, mere program" character, and a de facto standard package manager that leaves the base system the hell alone, almost never breaks, and can install many of the binary packages I want.

Also if I went back to Linux I'd have to figure out how to remap my window controls to Spectacle's defaults, which'd probably take forever or end up being impossible in the window manager I settled on or whatever.

It's the little things.

I had to program this and other special characters—notably •, ™, and ®—as an autohotkey script on my work PC. I was going insane. I already had autohotkey going to reverse the direction of Windows’ stubbon backwards scroll anyway. (Once I used so-called “natural scrolling” for a week it became impossible to understand why anyone would choose anything else.)

Also for me:

Opt-P for Pi π Opt-8 for Bullet • Opt-Shift-8 for Degree °

(And there are simple, memorable shortcuts for Pounds, Cents, Yen, Euro, Trademark, Copyright, Ohms, Infinity, and lots of math notation...)