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Comment by cookiengineer | Hacker News Reader

Pro Hint: due to licensing issues and EU regulations, "Windows Pro Education N" is pretty much the most bloatware free version, as it's also compliant with HIPAA.

- No media codecs

- No AI recording/transcription features due to missing media codecs

- No cortana

- No Teams upselling, no Office upselling, no Skype

- No self installing games

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I installed the N version once, and the lack of media codecs was infuriating. Most programs assume they are always present, so the error messages they give are cryptic and the average user won't guess the problem lies in their Windows having been N(eutered). What's worse, Microsoft website provides several guides that explain how to install the codecs, and they all contradict each other. I think https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/media-feature-pa... is the correct link, but I might be mistaken.

And of course Microsoft bundles a lot of additional programs like Groove Music and Skype with the codecs in a single pack.

Only when I started programming lambdas I realized how life-saving resource tests and error messages really are. You could say it was straightforward, when you think about it, but I definitely wasn't following it properly before. It turned to be a very important lesson, which I carried with me in all other environments as well "for fun and profit".

The fact that made me switch away from the N edition was the fact that the separately installable media codecs weren't available for weeks after my computer auto-updated to a new major Windows release. This basically made my computer unusable for many regular tasks I did, since as you noted most programs assume they're available.

I thought I would be clever and install the N edition of Windows 11, took me nearly two weeks to figure out what extra bits needed to be installed to allow a webcam to work.

Windows N(SA safe) :D

Jokes aside I am assuming if people are willing to go down the N route, they could probably also use tiny11 and just DIY install all drivers and codecs they need on that machine

Speaking as a dev, I recently hit that. In N editions even the APIs to query installed codecs do not work with a generic E_CLASS_NOT_REG. The docs for the API never mention that they are not available in N editions.

We had issues at work because Support guys had installed the N version in their VMs that they use to connect to our customers. Apparently some of our client's VPN software wouldn't start due to the missing media codecs.

Didn't take long to figure out and then download and install the media pack. But for a while every time they set up a new VM I had to help them with this.

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