Windows 10 on day 1 was still 'calling home' and recommending candy crush in the start menu as I recall. I had to dig into the registry to gut the windows store from it entirely to get windows 10 to act how i want an OS to act. Windows 7 was the last good windows IMO.

There is no amount that could answer that because the Ad profit is on top of the already existing product. It would always be viewed as a "loss."

Not that they're losing on the cost of operations and development of the OS, but because the ad revenue is in addition to the product...

Greed fucking greed fucking greed. Greed turtles all the way down...

But think of the shareholders. They would loose so much money they would probably have to sell their third yacht!

Last time I bought a Win 10 Pro DVD to install on a customer's machine, it was AUD$195.00. And I still had to use powershell to de-provision some of the bullshit. Better than the Home version (AUD$165.00), at least I can use GPEDIT to disable some "features".

Of course, a Windows licence on a pre-built Dell or HP would be a lot less.

You can't ungrind ground meat back.

While using Linux with Mate is perfectly possible

There is the LTSC version (not sure if 11 is released yet, but 10 definitely is) which is basically debloated windows. Made by Microsoft, and targeted towards embedded devices.