CachyOS has been phenomenal for me. Coming up on 7 months now without using windows beyond as a moonlight client on an ARM64 laptop (and windows server, because sysadmin gotta sysadmin.)

They should have stopped decades ago. Mint or Ubuntu are easier to install than Windows 2000 and way more powerful.

Is this one of those scam mails where you won something?

If that's really a concern, USB or PCIe NICs are always an option as a replacement, whether temporary or permanent. More advanced users can create virtual connections to route traffic through (macvlans) with custom configurable MAC addresses and/or use virtual machines that offer the same feature if a guest OS is preferred or necessary.

The identifier the article is talking about is instead persistent on any Windows OS regardless of hardware, including if the OS is a virtual machine. Using the OS at all on the Internet ensures Microsoft can always track it.

It's trivial to spoof