Sadly a lot of the privacy switches are exclusive to enterprise and education users, but our endpoints are running Pro (we have our previous supervisor to thank for that). I guess I'll hope this is one of the ones we can just toggle off without any fuss.
I'm curious whether the increasingly invasive telemetry of modern Windows will have legal implications surrounding patient privacy here in the US. I work IT in the healthcare field, and one of our key missions is HIPAA compliance. What, then, will be the impact if Microsoft starts storing more and more in-depth data offsite? Will keyboard entries into our EHR be tracked and stored in Microsoft's servers? Will we subsequently be held liable if a breach at Microsoft causes this information to leak, or if Microsoft just straight-up starts selling it to advertisers? Windows is our one-and-only option for endpoint devices, so it's not like we can just switch.
I genuinely don't have the answers to these questions right now, but it may start to become a serious conversation for our department in the future if things continue at the trajectory they're going at. Or, maybe I'm just old and paranoid and everything will be okie dokie.
Shoot, that's hardly an exaggeration - I was only recently able to deprecate the last of our Server 2003 instances, which was running a program originally designed for 2000 Server!
I work IT at a hospital here in the US. The key issue is compatibility. Most of our vendor software flat-out does not support Linux at all, either on the client or server side. Shit, half of it barely even works on modern versions of Windows.
I still use Clonezilla to back up devices before performing reinstalls/major updates (when Timeshift isn't practical). No issues so far backing up and restoring both Windows and Linux partitions/drives.
Honestly, if Mint has been working fine then I see no reason that you'd need to switch. If you're curious about trying out other distros, it could be worth using a program like Boxes to try out some VM's. Otherwise, I say you keep doing whatever works well for you.
As other have mentioned, setting up Timeshift + a firewall is a good start. I'm 99% sure that LM guides you through both of these processes on first boot, but it's a good thing to check on anyways. LM is pretty sanely put together out of the box, so I'd honestly just recommend you use it as-is and tweak things when/if you run into something that isn't doing it for you.
Luckily for you, there's a version 2!