Moving a laptop from Linux to Windows

[g el]

So this is a weird one,

I recently booted my windows partition on one of my laptops and it decided to destroy my root Linux partition, because .. reasons..

I luckily didn't lose my data/home partition "yet" but I decided maybe it's time to make this laptop a windows only machine, i have to admit this has its advantages since i would now be able to run some more apps than before. But anyway, I have some questions to clear up

1. I got an SSD to replace the current HDD in it. My laptop came with windows 8 installed, which I later upgraded to Windows 10, would I be able to simply boot a windows 10 installer and install everything or will I have to install windows 8 first and then upgrade?
2. I have no serial number on my laptop anywhere, is that still a thing? I only ever re-installed windows on this laptop from the recovery partition.
3. How can I get Windows to be more productive? I am really used to doing things with one command on Linux, I can install cmder to work around this, but what about software repositories, easy updates and a usable desktop environment? I'm interested in finding ways to make the windows experience closer to the Desktop experience one would get from GNOME for example.
4. Is anyone using the new Linux environment inside windows? Is it usable or would you recommend going with CYGWIN for shell needs?
5. How are your experiences of running Linux in a VM under windows for productive use?

A bit of extra background, I am a software developer, and my platform of choice is Java, so i have no obstacles there, i also have another laptop running linux which is my kind of day to day machine so i'm not suffering or anything

also, games don't matter much, I know what the system can run and i've used it a bit for some linux gaming before but it's not a factor to consider while optimizing my windows experience.

 

 

[ProjectBox153]

I'm not sure about all the Linux things, but I do know Windows. For question 1, I'm not quite sure. I've never had to deal with anything like that. For question 2, there is no product key on computers with Windows 8 or later. That is managed by the BIOS. It may be possible to use Windows 10 directly, but I'm not sure how that Microsoft Automatic Activation (or whatever they call it) works. 

[g el]

Thanks for the info, i guess there's no harm in trying to install on the ssd since i won't be removing anything from the HDD anyway. Worst case scenario the EFI partition won't recover since I have it on a 32GB M2 slot and won't be removed along with the old disk. But that is manageable.