Would love a Microsoft Gaming OS where I could run a browser, steam, and nothing else.
Game support is already good.
And, unfortunately, very far from complete. It is a good direction, however, and I am encouraged by it.
Another thing is that many games rely on older APIs and libraries that are bundled into Windows for compatibility reasons, so if you strip those out to make a slim gaming windows, your games won't work.
Did you know that turning off handwriting recognition for tablets makes it so keyboard presses do not cause the lock screen to open to the password textbox, or that it breaks the ability to start typing in the start menu for search results? There's probably a good reason for this, but now I'm way more cautious about turning services off.
a windows OS mode that is single user, networked, and meant for limited use (so background housekeeping windows tasks run after you exit or reboot out of this mode) would be pretty ideal, not just for raw performance (which would be measurable, but not the main goal) but to avoid apparently random decreases in performance due to Windows deciding to do something, or suddenly needing to deal with an authentication request dealing with mapped drives, or something.
Basically, Windows needs a "Game Console Mode".
If you want to get super crazy, I'll boot a second copy of Windows off of a vhdx file that's stripped down if I want extra performance.
With a little bit of work you can even clone the sid of your main os, and symlink most of your existing files and info, so it's almost identical to your main OS.
Calyp.to's guide is one of the best I've seen for stripping windows down to reduce latency.
https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1c2-lUJq74wuYK1WrA_bI...
And if you didn't do a clean install you can probably add a ton of extra stuff: Office trial; Another anti-virus, why not make your gaming environment even slower?; Games for a 5yo; Updaters and drivers that will haunt your system tray.
Nothing worse than your friends inviting you to play a quick match and be held by windows update screen for 15-30mins before you are even able to open Steam, and since I rarely boot the PC, all the time that I reserved for gaming was wasted by Windows.
There is significant drawbacks of LTSC, no Microsoft Store means no access to Game Pass, which has some good games, and some of the MP games only works among game pass users. Ended up buying an SSD and using the Enterprise version and stopping updates.
The bigger issue is that Win10 LTSC is increasingly far behind a "normal" Win10 (let alone Win11), which makes things increasingly screwy when it comes to both up-to-date drivers and anticheat. Fortnite, for example, would cause my machine to BSOD within 30 seconds of loading (if not sooner) due to (I suspect) its combination of EasyAntiCheat and BattleEye getting derailed; upgrading to Win11 (and putting up with its bullshit) seems to have fixed it.