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Comment by worewood | Hacker News Reader

If they shipped a version of Windows sporting the Windows-11 kernel, so running all the recent software, but with Windows 2000 UI for a thousand dollars I would buy it immediately.

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It’s not quite Windows 2000, but the LTSC edition has much of the bullshit stripped out. It does not support the store therefore Candy Crush is not installed by default. And I don’t think it’s quite $1000, if you can figure out how to buy it.

It's available in volume licensing, with a 5 license as minimal order.

Can also get it free with a Visual Studio subscription, that's where I got mine.

Just checked VS subscription page and didn't find it, maybe it's kinda hidden? I'm chatting with a sales representative regarding this.

The Visual Studio web site is impossible to decode. I think this is the page:

https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/subscriptions/#software-a...

Basically they give you every version of Windows so you can test your code. So 10 LTSC is in there. I run it in my VMs because it uses so little memory and CPU compared to the regular one.

I don't know which flavor of subscription you need to get it. I got my sub free as an MVP.

Thanks!

Snooped around and looks like the only option is to purchase VS Enterprise + Github Enterprise (professional versions don't work). This is definitely going to be pricy. I guess if my company has enterprise license I might be able to take advantage of that...

I just logged in to check mine sub and it does say Visual Studio Enterprise :(

But IIRC you need an active directory domain, so a server license to run this all off of.

>But IIRC you need an active directory domain

No? I installed it in a VM just fine without it. During initial setup there's a "domain join" option, but all that does is create a local account.

Apparently you can pad the 5 license minimum with cheap licenses, so it's not like you need to fork over $1000+ to get started.

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

It's also available on certain sites.

Although I haven't figured out how to ...install the latest version, it seems more complex than the one before.

Been running Windows Server as my desktop dev environment since NT4. Back then it was so the dev environment was the same as the server environment, that’s pretty much fixed now so it’s just to avoid all this horrible store nonsense. Can’t upgrade from 2019 as I don’t have a TPM so no WSL2 or new terminal but happy to accept that trade off. And shout out to win2k server which was awesome!

Windows 10 LTSE was under $20 on ebay, unsure of the legality of this.

> unsure of the legality of this.

I always have a laugh when I see this logic.

A product costing more than $200 and not available in the consumer market without some hoops to jump? Of course someone would resell it for $20 (including their profit) totally legally.

The latest LTSC actually doesn't have as much stripped out anymore. Telemetry choices are the same now and also MS accounts are there. I was really disappointed when I tried it.

Hold up. Windows 11 LTSC forces you to use Microsoft accounts, you can't go local at all? Not doubting, just need clarification.

No it doesn't force you, just like regular Win 10 Pro. But it does have the option and also the telemetry choice is now 'basic' or 'everything'.

LTSC is often hailed as the solution for privacy but when I last tried it it was just regular Win10 with a bit less bloatware (and the long term support of course). Didn't seem very different from Win10 on the privacy side at all.

One thing I forgot to check is if you can choose to delay updates to whenever you want. Obviously this is a big miss in Win10 and as LTSC is meant for mission critical systems I assume this is possible.

I don't recall which version it was exactly, but it was the latest I could get about a year ago when I tried. One of our colleagues in industrial automation got me a VM in their lab to try it out.

I think it allows you to disable a lot of crap in gpedit.

Not Windows, but you might get a kick out of the Serenity OS project: http://serenityos.org/

I haven't looked at the scene recently but in the past I've seen various projects on somewhat-underground (and often non-English) forums where they try to do similar things, mixing different versions of kernel and userland.

There is this more recent attempt, Win10 explorer.exe with Win11 kernel: https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/o6ytuw/so_i_replac...

The operating system would look consistent, but we would still have to deal with all the applications that decided they need to draw their own UI, including everything from Microsoft Office to all the web browsers to all the electrons apps.

It's too late for the Windows ecosystem.

Server isn't too far off...

That's true, but then you start running into weird compatibility issues, where a specific game won't work because an Xbox Live component is not installed or DirectX SDK is not at the right version (and you can't install the right version because it only works on the consumer OS).

Server 2012 (or was it 2008?) was absolutely terrible in that was absolutely Windows 8-ified with a forced full-screen metro start menu "experience," but that was fortunately rectified in the next release (Server 2016, I'm pretty sure).

It would take probably another $100M in engineering pay to do this, so unless there are 100k other people willing to pay $1,000 for this, you're short on how much you need to pay to actually get this done.

Windows 7 for me but yes, similar sentiment.

That's the dream.

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