If you’re really this poor, give me your address and I will mail you a thinkpad that noone will buy from me for more than $20.

If you don’t have a cheap throwaway laptop to try doing business with Linux, you have no business doing any business.

Any ffmpeg based media player like mpv can play pretty much any video format that you will ever have to watch.

PDF viewing can be done even in your browser if there’s no PDF viewer to your liking.

Handling word documents is going to be a big problem… But even running Linux, then setting up a virtual machine to run windows on for some tasks, is better than running windows.

And while you can use anything for servers, even Microsoft refuses to use Windows Server for their own servers and uses Linux based OS, so go figure.

What else is there, your favorite flavor of BSD? Unless someone else already ported everything necessary, it will be a DIY project and you will be the one telling people about it.

There aren’t that many options that just work out of the box other than Linux, it’s most popular, and practically just works for anything you can imagine self hosting, of course people will be talking about it almost exclusively, because using something else is a pointless duplication of effort for what purpose exactly?