want to remove windows 10 and put linux on. But

[intertan]

I could probably use linux and drop windows 10, only thing is I would like to keep the option to put it back on if needed. laptop that didn't come with any sort of recovery.

is it possible?

[Lenovo1984]

You can dual boot Linux and Windows.

[CDL Hazamat]

Yes. Although without any specificity to your laptop its hard to advise specifically. So here is a general answer.

 

Do some research first.

You should verify the flavor of linux you're trying to install will actually work for you.

Find your windows 10 key and save it somewhere for later use.

Make a bootable win10 usb for later use. (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10)

Install linux.

[Guest]

I won't suggest using OEM versions of Windows anyway, there is no reason to do that. Maybe just the drivers, but most of the time if you got a working connection Windows update will take care of it.
Why don't just dual booting? Then remember you would have to partition your hard disk correctly 
In case you have an UEFI PC a FAT32 100M with esp and boot flags partition is required, then you could just partition two spaces with NTFS and ext4