Aye, there's nothing new about an OS developer gathering information from Beta versions to polish the final product, can be a bit worrying in the final version though

Having said that,I do believe Windows mostly gives you options about what you want them to receive.
I am reading reports of MS insisting on a user logging in to their Windows identity to be able to access all of Win 10's functions, the inbuilt games being one such example. I'll have to do more research on this as I don't fully understand it.
Bootneck: lots of folk think they'll dump Windows and go 100% Linux and many do manage it, but so far you don't seem to have had much joy with Linux. It seems to me, actually, all your problems stem from dual booting.
Let me make a suggestion.
Either get another hard drive and swap it with your Windows hard drive then install Linux without having to worry about dual booting, or format your main hard drive and install Linux only.
This would force you to get to know Linux and help you master it.
I still think it's very likely you will miss some aspects of Windows but if that turned out to be so then you could always go back.
The desire to be independent of Microsoft and save money is an honourable one but it's a notion that should also be tempered with a sense of reality.
I loathe the Microsoft business mentality and their sneaky practices and if one good thing came out of Win 8.1 it showed the public MS in their true colours - they got it wrong, pure and simple.
But I like my games and I like Windows relative ease of operation so for the immediate future at least, Windows still has a place in my computer setup.