Comment by owenwil

The 'phones home' argument doesn't really add up—there's plenty of control over this at this point, and every OS is calling home, macOS included, to some degree. The advertisements thing happens out of the box, and is trivial to remove (if my memory is correct, Safari harasses you about being the default browser, too, if you try to change it). The updates to add features thing.... isn't an issue for me, but YMMV.