We need a cultural shift in this industry away from thinking it’s OK to run outdated and vulnerable software. “Why should we upgrade? $OLD_VERSION works fine!” Yeah, and driving a car with no seatbelts or airbags works fine too... until it doesn’t.
And on top of that you have the telemetry, endless horror stories of forced restarts for updates, updates resetting settings and/or degrading performance (which took 5 months to resolve in the case of the Creators Update: https://betanews.com/2017/09/11/windows-10-game-performance-...)...7 works like clockwork, with no bullshit.
And that's why you get LTSB, which have no "feature updates", only security updates for 10 years. Although one disadvantage is that the release schedule is sporadic (there was one in 2015, 2016, and the next one is in 2019). I guess you could also use get the pro edition and choose "defer upgrades", which buys you ~6 months before having to install a feature upgrade.
That's why you wish you could get LTSB, but you can't unless you're a large corporation. For most users, it's not a solution, it's a tease.
I'm not arguing that Windows 10 LTSB is easy to get or economical, but I've put it into a couple pretty small companies. It's definitely not geared toward home users, but it's not just "large corporations" either.
People still ride motorcycles, many times more dangerous, which proves that (IMHO fortunately) safety/security is NOT the only thing that everyone cares about.
The general authoritarianism in the comments here, and implication that everyone always and only wants "more secure", while neglecting all the other factors, is a bit unsettling...
As the old saying goes, "Those who sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither."
Microsoft has done nothing good for their customers with the bullshit path they've taken since Windows 8.
Google "Windows 10 start button stopped working" and spend a good 20 minutes reading forum posts about the problem. What you'll find is typical of Windows 10: there are no good answers for why it happens, the only consistent solution is to reinstall the OS, and it has been a problem for years and still hasn't been fixed. Meanwhile, they did take the time to remove "Control Panel" as an option when right-clicking the start button, and add a feature that begs you to try Edge when you set another browser as default.
You're misinformed
https://np.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/74xc2z/windows_an...
https://np.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/6ifyxq/spotify_for_...
One direct implication of this fact, for programs which must be constantly updated to fix their security flaws, is that because the only semblance of trust and security you can obtain in using this software comes from its popularity and reputation (because these things generally mean a large amount of resources can be spent auditing and testing ("many eyes make all bugs shallow"), and because a large userbase means that any bugs found will be more valuable and more difficult to find, and thus less likely to be used against people who are not profitable to be hacked, which is most people), viably forking large projects becomes impossible without a similar or proportional amount of resources to the original project. Without that, having confidence in the new project becomes much more difficult, because you cannot receive an assurance that bugs found in the original project will be fixed in the fork, and because bugs found in the fork might be easier to find (because of less thorough testing, because of fewer resources) and so of less value, and so have a higher chance of ending up in the hands of low-level skiddies who might use them even less responsibly than e.g. the NSA (who has never directly installed ransomware on anyone's computer, that I know of). None of this of course is mentioning the effect this culture of fear and mistrust (and its basis in reality) has on computer users who truly are valuable targets, and must use computers to do their job knowing full well that they are a mire of both intentional and unintentional security vulnerabilities and that somewhere out there exists a string of exploits that can be used to exfiltrate their IP address and send them straight to the gulags.
Another cost of this unfortunate facet of computer programming is that for programs which cannot be directly updated (for example, their source code is not available), modifying them so that they are closer to a version with clearly-defined semantics is extremely difficult, involves specialized skills which are not possessed by most programmers, and generally just doesn't happen very often. Although one could also make this an argument in favor of source code availability, in any case this is a very common occurrence.
So, I don't think at all that the problem is this culture of foolishly thinking that we actually know how to write programs - the problem is that we can't. The solution then, at least in the long term, is learning how to write complete programs that do not require constant adjustments in order to ensure clearly defined semantics, not to just figure out how to stay afloat better in this horrifying quagmire of shifting quicksand that we've built the foundations of computer software on.