Back in the day I wanted to be a 1337 hAx0R so I installed Linux to get my wifi adapter into monitor mode so I could pwn wifi. Eventually I just didn’t leave Linux, probably in part because a few friends of mine ran it and refused to run Windows, we used to have LAN parties fairly regularly so yeah just convenient.

In essence yes, for example VMware ESXi hosts can be managed by a single image with customizations made at the cluster level. Give me pxe and I can provision you n hosts in about the same time as 1 host