Deactivating the services that call home doesn't stop Windows 10 from calling home. You can only completely disable "telemetry" if you have Windows 10 Enterprise Edition and even then I'm not entirely sure it does completely shut down.

And anyway, even getting to this meant manually ticking out dozens of boxes in several settings windows and installing a packet sniffer to check your own computer for unwanted connections. Nevermind that running a packet sniffer on your outgoing connections usually means you suspect you have a virus (which is what Win10 is?), it requires technical expertise that 95% of Win10 users won't have.

No I don't think GP was driven by hatred of Microsoft, as much as a genuine dislike of an operating system which hands over control of your own computer to someone else. I always thought Stallman was being hyperbolic when he said "with free software the users control the computer, with proprietary the computer controls the users", but I don't anymore.