The game isn't flowing

[AnyOldName3]

My main point was that if you care about the stuff that's still there, you shouldn't be using a proprietary OS at all unless it's been audited by an organisation you trust, and they've said it doesn't phone home. From what I've read, there are a bunch of security updates for Windows 7 which (probably for no good reason) have the telemetry updates as a dependency, so even if you've skipped them in the past, they get installed once those security patches get installed and there's no way around that except also skipping the security patches. You're stuck with either Microsoft knowing what you're doing (but if they can be trusted, it's all anonymised and used solely for Good™) or a bunch of people who write malware knowing what you're doing (and as evidenced by them creating malware, they don't care about the law or ethics). I'm unconvinced that it can be disabled and then stay disabled and do what you'd expect a disabled service to do (i.e. nothing ever).

If you do feel like making the switch to something open-source, but want to keep your Windows applications, WINE, ReactOS and Mono are all open-source and probably have tasks that you might be able to help with. You don't need to be a programming wizard who's willing to spend the rest of his life in a cave hiding from Microsoft's assassins to help make Windows applications work flawlessly without running proprietary code.