Most people get their OS by having it subsidized in the hardware. Windows OEM licenses, OS X, and virtually every mobile OS are funded this way. The rub there is this forum is largely made up of folks who DIY their builds, and MS no longer sells the System Builder / OEM licenses like they once did. There's also the side issue that hardware-tied licenses don't always get upgrades - Andriod is pretty notorious about it, and so is Microsoft with Windows - Apple is the only one I would call generous with that aspect.
To be fair to Microsoft here, if you'd bought Windows 7 / it came with a system, you could have a fully-activated Windows 10 install for that system today. I have more than a few systems running that first came with 7 myself, and I think I paid for one of the upgrades along the way. I also ran Start...whatever to replace the 8/8.1 start 'screen' and anemic menus and have only really dealt with those on old Server systems.
There's Free / Open Source. That is a viable option, provided you have support for the stuff you need. Just be prepared to do a lot of your own support and for updates to happen whenever they **** well please.
As much as I'd like this one, we find real quick that open-source when it comes to UIs is a cluster. Give Microsoft all the flack you want for their incremental Windows 10 UI upgrades, at least they work!
Apple much the same here, with even less flexibility.
I
will say that there are FOSS options that work pretty well and I've been quite happy with the Cinnamon desktop across various base distros, including Mint. I also just tossed the latest Solus Budgie into Virtualbox and I think it's time to give that one a serious run too, on a dedicated machine of course.
And you could do ad/data-supported, like ChromeOS. I fear a "free" version of Windows would turn into this - which would be a privacy nightmare and as annoying as all get out to use, but a lot of people don't seem to mind at all so long as they don't need to shell out any money.
As far as privacy goes, if you use any modern computing device with a vendor-supported OS and say use any cloud-based services or any social media, you're already profiled and cataloged. You'd have to have gone to Sarah Conner grade lengths to prevent that.
Given all 5 of those options, I love Apple OS longevity, but you are definitely paying for it with the Apple Tax. Yeah, when I roll my own hardware I'd prefer to buy it once and be done with it, but I'm not vehemently opposed to a subscription either. So long as it comes with the understanding that I'm already paying cash, I'm not paying with my data and/or privacy as well.
As with the above, privacy in a basic sense is more of a thing of the past. I don't really know the 'way forward' here, as there never
really was real privacy even before the information age; it's just easier to get that information today, like any information, and it's only going to get easier.
