> No more whack-a-mole MS telemetry I have to read obscure guides to find out how to turn off.

My routine at some point after moving to W10 was to create/update system partition image, turn off all bypasses/tweaks that kept update components tamed. Then do the update, reboot and quickly run through all setting that in the past tend to reset "itself", apply tweaks again and reboot to see if these still work, and finally - look up if some processes or services were added.

I was dualbooting, using VM's for years and pandemic gave me something to do so I finally escaped from Microsoft grip.

Tho, it wasn't issues-free ride. Mint and Manjaro would randomly soft-hang for no reason; some Manjaro updates would made me few times reinstall the system (that would be still faster than manually correcting everything). I had to freeze GPU drivers for older card because newer ones would crash games. Keeping unified look across all types of applications is indeed a sloppy task - especially with all Gnome shenanigans regarding theming but atm is still doable. But overall, I'm happy and I see how much changed and improved since Mandrake 8 times when I tried Linux for the first time.

For majority of people, for doing basic tasks plus playing some games Linux should be fine.