> the correct Windows edition that provide the features they want.

The correct Windows edition is LTSC or IoT or whatever BS name they've since come up with. It's a license that can only be obtained from a reseller (since putting up a form that takes credit card details and spits out product keys is too complex for MS) and has a minimum order quantity (I believe you can pad the order with cheap "client access licenses" to get around that).

I ran the version that shipped with my Dell. It was paid for. And mostly I want the ability to turn things off that retail Windows won't let you turn off.

People use the OS that came preinstalled on the machine. Not even Windows took off until Microsoft started armtwisting OEMs to preinstall it (Windows 3.0, 1990). And coming soon from Microsoft: locked bootloaders that prevent you from installing another OS! You know, because security, and no one installs alternative operating systems anyway.

Locked bootloader was making sense when PC was a huge investment, and the whole household was sharing it. Windows XP introduced fast account switching. And Windows still has it, but do you remember when was the last time you left your session active locked out and allowed someone else to log in to the same PC? Is there any other user at all on your current home PC? PC was standing for personal computer long before it was, but then it became. We don't share PC anymore in average.

Not only we don't share PC anymore, but PCs started to share us. We possess several PCs per single person, and we needed Dropbox to manage files on multiple PCs. Dropbox can be perceived as second turning point in time, and it was more than decade ago. Now it's one goal = one device era. We buy device and we sincerely don't intend to install anything else on it. We don't risk our data using NTFS shrinking tools to make spare room for another filesystem. We don't dual boot losing access to programs in another partition. There are ways to mount NTFS in other OS and vice versa, so documents may stay accessible, but programs are not runnable. This is now ridiculous. We just buy two, three, whatever devices and have all programs runnable simultaneously.

If we need something from another OS, we'll precisely buy compatible hardware without locked bootloaders or any other possible obstacle which are numerous. To name a few.

For DOS retrogaming we need DOS ISA DMA sound, and we pick PC with ISA slot and making sure motherboard chipset has DMA on ISA, which is not true on latest chipsets. For another DOS retrogaming option we consider VDMSound, but last OS to support it was Windows XP, and we choose hardware that is Windows XP compatible. Most likely UEFI-only boot will be a problem for Windows XP. For Mavericks Forever we are not going to look for random incompatible Mac. That is going to be either real compatible Mac selected from known list, or else compatible Hackintosh. On Hackintosh there was a big problem with software upgrade, but there will be no upgrades for Mavericks Forever. Tim Cook drives company away in direction we don't appreciate, and Mavericks Forever stays forever the same version.

Nowadays people are not using OS anyway. Nowadays people are using browser. I wish I could drag and drop documents in Mavericks Forever like I did in 2007. But document is now likely to be draw io, rectangular embedding for browser that cannot support drag and drop outside its rectange. And so messenger is also rectangular embedding for browser, not respecting Mac OS X multi-window paradigm, not supporting previously established gestures. In 2007 I thought that Qt programs on Mac were ugly. Those happy days I have not seen Electron yet.

People I know often report that they got rid from "dust collector", the PC. They are now all-Android. As time goes by, it is harder and harder to find someone with PC. So whatever Microsoft preinstalls or bootlocks on PCs, it goes to people less and less.