Windows is not free.

Just skip entering a key. It won’t bother you.

Before that it was the free upgrade from win7/8 which was unprecedented. They really want you to be on win 10 to push their store.

But they don't give you an ISO to download for free, do they? Even Apple makes it a little awkward to get the actual OS installer (if you aren't already on a Mac running the App Store.app).

Sure they do. It's like literally the first result for "windows 10 iso".

Ha! Oddly I can't actually get that page to render, I see it paint for a second and then it goes white and tries to load some tracking js forever. But point taken!

Last time I tried to download the win10 iso while on windows, their site proposed me the download of something along the lines of an installation tool. Shortly after that I tried the same webpage while running Ubuntu and the site proposed me the download of the full win10 iso. I believe that the webpage checks few alternatives prior to passing you the ISO .

> Just skip entering a key. It won’t bother you.

Tell that to the police when then check your PC for pirated software...

Yes, because your time is not free, which you will be forced to spent while fighting the OS.

> because your time is not free

That makes Debian-flavored Linux my most expensive operating system. I spent a non-trivial amount of time figuring out how that thing works at all!

Actually, I spent way more time on Windows back in the day, so I guess Debian was a relative bargain.