“And other areas, like you can’t really control the ‘phone home’ aspects of windows.”
THIS IS A HUGE ONE that MS apologists do not want to talk about... The backdoors. You can even hard power off Linux with the button, even during a boot up, and it will still just boot up again fresh without “Linux was not shut down properly”. Why does MS do this? Because it didn’t get to package and phone home with an info dump about your last session. So it has to go back and gather that and get that info packaged for a “catch up” dump to MS next time you make an internet connection. And absolutely, a computer should belong to you not perpetually to Microsoft. Any settings you make should stay as you make them period. I don’t like sneaky backdoor crap. And MS is all about sneaky backdoor crap as a built in feature.
Just this alone is HUGE and absolutely worth any and all extra efforts you may encounter using Linux. It is now YOURS and no longer anyone else’s business what you do with it.
Wow I didn’t realize that the windows ‘didn’t boot correctly’ was doing that. Egads!