Can I retain the Windows 10 product key that came with my laptop? (Might switch back/dual boot)

[harsh garnet]

For some context, my current OS is still Windows 10, and I wanted to dual boot or possibly switch fully to Xubuntu. My hardware is an Acer Aspire E5-575g laptop (the model with the 1080p screen, Nvidia GeForce 940MX secondary GPU, and Intel Core i5 7200U main GPU/CPU). In the past, I had another laptop running Windows 10, and when I switched back to Windows 10 from Xubuntu, the OS had lost my product key, so I was stuck with the Activate Windows watermark for the rest of my days. I don't want that same issue to happen again, since lots of customization features were locked away and I couldn't even set my theme or desktop background.

Also, as a bit of an aside, this laptop's BIOS is locked down so extremely hard that you have to accept like 3 different prompts just to disable Secure Boot. If anyone wants to privately VC with me and take a look, I can video call from my phone and point the camera at my screen so you can see the options it gives me.

[slender pine]

The safest way is to have your Linux installation on a completely separate storage medium, i.e. on an external drive or something.

Dual booting is messy, and will likely to continue being that way when windows exists.

[harsh garnet]

I really don't have the money nor the time to deal with obtaining and keeping track of an external drive, so I suppose that I would be simply swapping to Xubuntu... But my initial question still stands: Can I retain the Windows 10 product key that came with my laptop when I bought it?

[sacred spoke]

dual booting like the user said is very messy and can cause all kinds of issues.

the product key is technically inside the BIOS like they said the easiest way to do this is to get another hard drive. this is why i dont do linux on laptops. i have a pc with 3 SSDs one for windows for gaming amd then 2 for linux

[winged musk]

No problem. I used to install both window and arch on the same hard drive