My apologies, I conflated it with something else they embedded into UEFI around the same time. Lenovo Service Engine had security vulnerabilities and couldn't be removed with a fresh Windows install, as UEFI would just execute it at startup.

I've had a few false starts with Linux. I've tried a couple different distros here and there over the last 20-ish years, but I never make it more than a week before falling back to Windows. That said, I hate Microsoft's direction, and I'm holding onto Windows 10 as long as I can.