misplaced blame, I think.
You can't blame M$ for the size of their updates relative to the size of your disk space.
You can of course blame M$ for the over large bloated crap they install by default into their OS tho..
Most likely a 2.5" SSD in that thar machine(the most common SSD type, and the cheapest form factor) .. and for about $100 you could easily update it yourself to a 256Gb drive too.
That would be where I'd concentrate my energy on that device.
As for any supposed speed advantage in running Linux over Windows(XP, 7 and 10) I've dual booted Linux(Mandrake and then Ubuntu) running GIMP on both OSes and I've always found that Windows runs GIMP faster.
Never tried it on raw(NEF) files tho, only some largish tifs and mostly jpgs.