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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

As I always say in these threads, I would be happy to pay Microsoft for a Windows license that doesn't have Cortana, Teams, telemetry uploads, the app store, etc. I just want to run applications that through past probably-illegal monopolistic actions, require APIs that only exist on Windows machines. Accept that you are just boring plumbing, and don't have any "value added services", and you earn my money. (Oh, and ship the damn patch for Hyper-V that adds nested virtualization on AMD processors. It's been in preview builds for like 2 years!)

Computers are about the applications you run and what you make with them. Nobody wants to know the name of their OS vendor, or buy anything else from them. Sorry, Microsoft. If something is good, I'll find out about it. (Happy to pay for Github, for example!)

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I had exactly the same issue. The solution is Windows LTSC (long term service package). It has no Cortana, teams, or Windows store, no Telemetry, and only update about once a month and it never updates automatically, only when you allow it to. It’s designed for applications where a computer has to be stable for a long time.

A copy can be a pain to get a hold of because Microsoft only want to licence it to corporate clients, so it’s usually not possible for individuals to buy a licence at any price. Microsoft really don’t want regular people to have access to it.

but if you look on your favourite piracy site you should see it. Then use a Windows keygen and presto it’s activated.

How can you be sure these copies of Windows haven't been tampered with?

I honestly think you could run a cryptominer on it and wouldn't be any worse than all the other shitware MS bloats it with

you can verify the sha256sum against MS official list

Where is this official list? A quick google search just returns forums which seem to conclude that these are no longer published by MS.

There are some dumps online like https://www.heidoc.net/php/myvsdump.php or https://sha1.rg-adguard.net/

The issue about verification still remains. We have no way of knowing if these haven't been tampered with as well. If a malicious actor is tampering with ISOs on a large scale, they will make sure their tampered copies have the most seeds and their fake checksum lists will be at the top of search results.

find a friend with MSDN access (or whatever it's called this week), the digests are all in there

(they used to be public)

The images(wim/esd format) are downloaded from Microsoft servers. There is no tampering.

https://my.visualstudio.com includes Windows LTSC for MSDN subscribers. There is even an IoT edition.

Windows IOT is not likely what you are thinking, it for example doesn't have a UI.

I use it, embedded edition basically.

> I just want to run applications that through past probably-illegal monopolistic actions, require APIs that only exist on Windows machines.

It's gonna be ironic if one day Wine becomes the best way to run those applications because Microsoft ruined their own platform with ads and surveillance.

Well in the edge-case requirement of running several copies of Microsoft Word simultaneously, WINE has Windows beat.

https://www.reddit.com/r/winehq/comments/he1pc0/went_overboa...

Windows should have a "minimal install" option were it only installs the base operating sysyem and not much else. That's why Windows XP/7 will always be the pinnacle of Windows releases in my opinion.

It does, but Microsoft doesn't consider that level of minimalism to be an "end user" use-case, so it's not an option available to end users to install.

Instead, in Microsoft's minds, this is a use-case exclusively of interest to embedded-device system integrators (i.e. the people building the world's ATMs, billboards, gas pumps, slot machines, ticket kiosks, etc.) So that's how they market it: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/

Make no mistake, though, you can just download and install Windows IoT Core onto any random PC; and (mostly) arbitrary Windows apps can be installed and run on top of Windows IoT Core.

The only proviso being, that IoT Core is maybe a bit too minimal for your use-case: IoT Core assumes you don't need a desktop (because you're likely remotely managing the device, and deploying a full-screen kiosk-style app that isn't meant to be broken out of.) It still has a graphical "control plane" shell sort of thing, but it's entirely built on the Metro/UWP UX, with no ability to launch programs in windowed mode. (Essentially, there's no window manager running.) I believe this means that Win32 apps that try to spawn multiple windows (e.g. old versions of Photoshop that make the palettes their own windows), won't work on IoT Core. Most modern stuff avoids that, though.

I would note that this "remote-deploy and boot apps in fullscreen, with access to Win32 but not GDI, graphics only though UWP" paradigm, closely mirrors the experience of using an Xbox One in developer mode. I bet the "distro" of Windows used between IoT Core and the modern Xbox are near-identical.

Many standard Win32 widgets, such as context menus and tooltips, are themselves top-level windows - so if Core doesn't support that at all, it would break a lot more than just Photoshop.

Core is for headless deployment, not for running Photoshop.

I would disagree, insofar as one of the use-cases for IoT Core (and Windows Embedded before it) is for developing kiosks that run arbitrary single apps. That could include e.g. a tablet that only runs Photoshop.

But the assumption in those use-cases is that you as the system-integrator are either also the developer of the app being embedded, or at least have access to the engineers of the ISV who developed the app; and so you can get the app recompiled [and potentially slightly rewritten in the process] for the target profile (UWP) that IoT Core supports. IoT Core doesn't support just taking arbitrary Win32 GDI apps and kiosk-ifying them.

...but Windows IoT Enterprise does! IoT Enterprise is just Windows Pro LTSC but with IoT Core's virtual-appliance versioned-image deployment and management process. You can totally kiosk a "legacy" Win32 GDI app using IoT Enterprise. That's what a lot of modern billboard manufacturers and the like are still doing (until they finish redeveloping their signage apps for IoT Core), which is why you'll still sometimes see e.g. an airport terminal sign sitting around on the Windows desktop when its kiosk app failed to boot. That's an IoT Enterprise deployment.

But IoT Enterprise isn't any more minimal than Pro LTSC, it's just different, so it wasn't really the point of the discussion here. If you're a home user putting Windows on your own PC, you'd want to use Pro LTSC, not IoT Enterprise. (Unless "your own PC" is your RaspPi that you're trying to set up as a smart-fridge weather widget or something. Then maybe you do want IoT Enterprise.)

Good news: You can go ahead and do that for about $270 per copy of Windows.

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

Someone told me this when I made a similar comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27671028

You would pay them? Paying Microsoft to not put garbage in your operating system is like paying the mafia to not break your shop windows.

In some way I see it the same as buying organic food in a premium. First time I learned about people paying extra for organic I thought "but that's how people always used to eat especially if you grew up in a village".

A lot of food is organic, but has to be sold as non-organic because the farm can't pay the licensing/program costs of using the official organic label.

To make the analogy work, all food would be grown organic, but only companies can buy it untampered with. Before selling to consumers producers would infuse the produce with trace amounts of neurotoxin.

Isn't this normal for apps? Spotify has a free version that is ad supported.

Microsoft is giving away Windows. Remember that not that long ago you had to pay €$200+ for an OS.

$139 for Windows Home and $199 for Windows Pro. Where I come from this would not be called giving away.

Official MS pricing: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/b/windows?activetab=pi...

Eh, it's the same. The price floor is just different.

Most people surely buy/bought their license with a new PC from an OEM; OEM's apparently always paid much less, e.g. 50$ (in 2009) https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/09/micro... - and less if it was a cheap/low-end device: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/microsoft-reducing-w...

I'm guessing they're not going to drop those fees, so whatever ad or product-placement revenue comes in is probably on top of that?

>Accept that you are just boring plumbing, and don't have any "value added services", and you earn my money.

I'd love to see numbers on how much long term projected revenue their captive audience telemetry and ad delivery platform are valued at. I wouldn't be surprised if it renders the actual OS license sales look like a drop in the bucket.

I'd like to see windows be part of office 365. Windows users get 'free' Windows on the desktop and Mac users can get licenses for parallels.

Maybe they could set it up so that Windows is free with ads, but subscribers can turn everything off and get full control.

Office 365 E5 includes this. Or at least a Windows 10 Professional license. Not sure if you have to have Windows 10 normal first.

Sounds like you want Windows AME.

I had not heard of this project, thanks for sharing! Do you have experience using it? Is it stable in practice? How much efforts do you need for maintenance post-install compared to a normal system?

Extremely stable and fast, although the difference in UI can take some getting used to, since the Start menu is so cut down. I'd recommend installing OpenStart to get a more traditional experience. Windows Update is stripped out entirely, so I eventually went with LTSC for the sake of drivers and such. If programs like WuMgr ever stop being able to control Windows Update I might go back to AME.

Good to know, thank you

Windows Server?

LTSB

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