All you need is Windows 10 Professional and you can change the settings of the group policy editor to not take automatic updates. You still get an annoying nag notification from Windows Security. There are plenty of articles about how to edit the registry to disable automatic updates if you do not have Windows Pro or above.
The problem is that Microsoft's goal for several years now has been to eventually get Windows users switched to a subscription type service. All these constant updates are probably at least partially intended to condition users for the changes coming in the future.
If it were not that I have some much time and money invested in software that runs on Windows and not on other operating systems, I would have switched. The other issue is that most new laptops come with Windows installed and many are difficult to get all the features enabled. I have one that is several years old that no one has figured out how to get a version of Linux.
I still have my old Lenovo laptop running on Windows 7, but the thing is literally falling apart.
I had to screw around with the UEFI boot option on my Toshiba laptop to test a Ubuntu OS, and it borked my Windows installation.
Took me an hour to figure out how to get it back.
You probably have a similar issue - you have to screw with UEFI stuff, and the machine won't like it.
“The UEFI settings screen allows you to disable Secure Boot, a useful security feature that prevents malware from hijacking Windows or another installed operating system. However, it can also prevent other operating systems — including Linux distributions and older versions of Windows like Windows 7 — from booting and installing.”
You’re right about the ‘subscription’ service model.
When there are no more things you can really add to a word processing software (Like Microsoft Word) you cannot charge users for the next version.
So, they created Office365 which gives you much less features, runs like crap, but you get to pay for it every year!
If the original version of Word sucked as bad as the Office365 version, we’d all be using WordPerfect now.