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Comment by reincarnate0x14 | Hacker News Reader

If you are forced to put up with Windows, do yourself a favor and use LSTC. Almost all of this garbage behavior seems to be restricted to the retail channel builds and major update packs.

Sadly there is apparently no limit to what people will be conditioned to put up with.

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> do yourself a favor and use LSTC

Would be nice if you could mention how your typical reader could feasibly (and legally) do this.

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2167558-explicit-inst...

If you want to be 100% legit.

Interesting, am I reading it right that this ...

“ 4x Microsoft Identity Manager - 1 User CAL - Open Business (NK7-00031)”

... means to get a valid single-user LTSC license you need four Identity Manager licenses? That’s odd

I think the gimmick is they'll only sell it in a package of a total of 5 licenses of some sort total, so this is probably the cheapest other thing you can buy to get to that count.

Ahhhh good thinking, thanks!

Microsoft licensing is such a byzantine hellscape that this assuredly is more complicated than can be easily summarized, but pretty much any of their resellers do have VL upgrade options. I don't normally like linking to vendors as it's not my job to drive them sales, but one of the top links off DDG:

https://softwaremedia.com/shop/microsoft-windows-10-enterpri...

Many people will find themselves happily hoisting a jolly roger with a KMS emulator (several on github) given that they very likely already paid for a retail license of Windows and LTSC is basically just Windows 10 minus all the horrible annoying shit.

I don't doubt it's bad but it could be worse, you could be trying to use Oracle software.

"not as awful as Oracle" is hardly an endorsement :)

Or you can buy a $10 key from Amazon, and not worry about KMS stopping working. I have no idea where those keys come from, but they work.

While this is a good tip, there could be strings attached though; recently I was working on a machine like this (not mine, acquired by another company) and it didn't seem possible to apply updates, just saying 'contact your system administrator to update'. So I told the company they'd need to sort that out eventually but they also had no clue, and they called the shop wehere they got it but there also no sane response. This is just one data point of course, but does make me wonder: if you as a normale non-enterprise customer gets this, how would you deal with issues like this?

Maybe we would if you'd said what "LSTC" is.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/ltsc/

"With the LTSC servicing model, customers can delay receiving feature updates and instead only receive monthly quality updates on devices. Features from Windows 10 that could be updated with new functionality, including Cortana, Edge, and all in-box Universal Windows apps, are also not included. Feature updates are offered in new LTSC releases every 2–3 years instead of every 6 months, and organizations can choose to install them as in-place upgrades or even skip releases over a 10-year life cycle. Microsoft is committed to providing bug fixes and security patches for each LTSC release during this 10 year period."

Exactly, I was also befuddled by this.

From sibling comment's link, it is actually "LTSC": Long-Term Support Channel.

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