OpenRed perhaps? Don’t know if it requires an account to browse certain parts or Reddit.

Furthermore, I’ve found the answer to this being not just ”yes” but ”yes, most of them”. I think I’ll just give up.

All your points are a bit questionable:

1. Sure, you should click no to almost everything Microsofts asks anywhere, but that hardly helps. Use privacy tools like O&O Shut Up to actually disable spy stuff.
2. God no. Vivaldi is nice if you must have Chromium (this is made by the guys who used to build Opera, before it was sold to shady new owners), otherwise Firefox.
3. See point 1.
4. Just uninstall the damn thing, or some tools of point 1 might do this for you.
5. If you must, sure.

Using Enterprise version of Windows is the best option, it already has most of the malicious stuff left out.

Having cleaned a bunch of old folks phones in the past years this is far more common than we ”advanced” users think. It often starts with clicking an advert or some spam mail or message from (infected) friend, which to them, looks absolutely legit. Then the installed app spams the user with notifications to install more ”PDF readers”, ”phone cleanup apps” and whatnot. In best case these just flood the user with ads but just as easily can do more malicious stuff.

After some schooling (”never click anything that is offered to you” etc.) and putting up defencew like AdGuard (system level) the instances of ”my phone is slow”, ”what does this message mean” etc. have radically decreased. Apple devices have their own issues but this kind of troubles are next to non-existent there.

What?

Just let me know when I can install heavy Windows-only apps to Linux and I will make the switch in a second. A couple of examples: SOLIDWORKS CAD or PTC Creo (and related apps), Adobe CC (well for this there at least are foss alternatives but not fully compatible/comparable).

For a company, switching a CAD system for example would cost major $$$ and any automatic conversion is nowhere near complete, so you’d basically have to redraw everything relevant from scratch with the new system. Also there simply does not appear to be any major CAD system supporting Linux, NX used to but not anymore.