> Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any legal method to acquire Windows 10 Enterprise without signing up for all the other enterprise junk that no small business wants to deal with
Not sure if there is a misunderstanding here, but you're replying directly to my comment that explains how you can get the Enterprise edition without a volume licensing deal or any other "enterprise junk".
https://partner.microsoft.com/en-GB/membership/action-pack
That is immediately full of buzzword bull about partners and subscriptions, which is exactly the sort of enterprise junk I was referring to before. Notably missing however is any straightforward way to buy a legitimate copy of Windows 10 Enterprise, or anything resembling instructions for doing so or pricing information.
If you have indeed found a legitimate way to just buy a plain copy of Windows 10 Enterprise for use on a business PC without further strings attached, unfortunately I wasn't able to find it from the information in your previous comment.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/mpn-get-acti...
Yes, they make it harder than it needs to be, but it's not particularly difficult either. And you're not just buying Windows 10 Enterprise, which is why there is no "Buy Windows 10 Enterprise now!" button - it's a subscription to a veritable trove of software and Azure credits.
1. Sign up to join the Microsoft Partner Network 2. Buy the Action Pack
Since Windows 10 Pro isn't really a Pro edition in the historical sense, we're just looking for a suitable replacement in the Windows 10 generation. That would have to be Enterprise as things stand, because no edition below that would currently be acceptable in terms of having full control of our own systems. But Microsoft doesn't want to sell us anything close to a like-for-like replacement to the Pro editions we've used for many years with previous Windows versions, so we won't use Windows 10 as our main desktop OS.
There are none, you're looking too hard for road blocks! All that stuff only comes into play if you become a "real" Microsoft partner by paying them lots of money and attaining one of the competency tiers; for the Action Pack, you just give them $400/y (or whatever it is, I don't recall precisely).
I do appreciate your time writing these comments, but unfortunately what I'm seeing so far doesn't really look any more promising than anything I've come across in any previous discussions on this subject. If Microsoft ever decides to offer a simple licence at a reasonable price for a fully controlled edition of Windows 10, and if we haven't already got everything we need from the combination of six other platforms we currently use at my businesses anyway, maybe we'll take a look. For now, it seems their business model doesn't include having businesses like us as customers, and we're certainly not going to go out of our way to work around that and give them money anyway. After all, why on earth would we?
For many practical purposes, the higher Windows 10 tiers such as Enterprise and Education are a different product to the lower ones such as Home and Pro.
Microsoft isn't stupid and knows that professional sysadmins at large organisations would never surrender control of their corporate networks and the devices on them to an external party, so Microsoft doesn't try to push much-criticised aspects of Windows 10 such as mandatory telemetry and upgrades in that market.
If you want to get it, I recommend the Microsoft Action Pack
Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any legal method to acquire Windows 10 Enterprise without signing up for all the other enterprise junk that no small business wants to deal with. The Pro edition of Windows used to cater to the small business and power user market, yet bizarrely in Windows 10 that edition seems to have been heavily downgraded and is now little better than Home in the negative aspects we're talking about here.