No bloat, no ads, no forced or feature updates, optional security patches only, virtually nothing installed by default, and minimal telemetry.
However: I do not publicly endorse software piracy, and so do not recommend using this guide; legitimate LTSC licenses are only possible to come by for Businesses with a minimum spend of 5 licenses.[1] :(
[0]: https://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/98121318
[1]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/how-do...
MS doesn't care about piracy at all. They'd rather let you pirate it than losing you by switching to Linux or Mac
Stay awesome, 4chan.
For better or worse, Windows is a key part of my daily business and life in general, and I don't expect it to be free. I regularly use Windows applications that cost more than $1500 by themselves. If I wanted a free OS, there are other OSes for that, for which I would still have to pay with my time.
$1500 for a clean, advertising- and telemetry-free Windows LTSC license would be a bargain... if only they'd ask.
Source: my own "enterprise" has two users, a single Microsoft 365 E3 subscription, and no volume licensing agreement.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/e3
(the "Full Comparison" PDF linked from this page confirms that LTSC is included in this subscription)
I wonder if what it really means is that LTSC 11 is now enshittified.
Then sign up for the base level of a MSDN subscription. Get access to any flavor of Windows you want plus their development tools too: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/pricing-details/ Unless they've changed something, the OS license keys don't expire even if you let the subscription lapse. Yeah, it's for development use only but, as a home user, they're not going to audit you unless you do something really egregious.
They should not be using basic OS features as a wedge to make sure you open that precious Store icon and log in. Nobody wants that, and the only person who needs it is some mid-manager at Microsoft whose bonus is tied to store numbers.
Powershell/Terminal: "wsreset -i"
To my shock and horror, smtp service has been deprecated since server 2012, you can still install it but it comes with an extremely old version of IIS as a dependency and it’s broken out of the box.
To get it working you have to dig into some xml files and add parameters.
I really wonder how anyone can take a server OS seriously that doesn’t have out of the box first class functionality for smtp, one of the most ubiquitous protocols on the internet.
If I can install something from the OS it shouldn’t come broken and insecure.
It just feels like such a strange platform to build a server on to me.
Email use itself is waning and has never had privacy as a guaranteed feature.
The "Features Removed or Deprecated in Windows Server 2012" page has mentioned SMTP since the OS was still called "Windows 8 server": https://web.archive.org/web/20120517025232/http://technet.mi...
I suppose you could've missed this if you moved directly from WS2008 to WS2022, but I don't know any OS that publishes "things we have removed or deprecated in the last three versions", it's usually just "what changed from the previous version to the current one".
This is an actual claim if someone is interested: https://www.hmailserver.com/state
On SHA-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1
As of 2020, chosen-prefix attacks against SHA-1 are practical.[6][8] As such, it is recommended to remove SHA-1 from products as soon as possible and instead use SHA-2 or SHA-3. Replacing SHA-1 is urgent where it is used for digital signatures.
Digging further: https://www.hmailserver.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=40568
Tl;dr: it uses sha256 by default and only has sha1 for backwards compatibility, which is considered insecure today. Critical updates are still there.
Of the devices that still run Windows in our home, all but one of them run some version of LTSC.
> No bloat, no ads, no forced updates, virtually nothing installed by default, and minimal telemetry.
No Store, no Cortana, no Edge. What's not to like? ;)
I'm a hybrid person. I run Linux for my work and dev OS and Windows for gaming and day to day shenanigans. If you're just going to strip Windows down to this weird broken minimal thing tho why not just use Linux full time and get a PS5/Xbox for the AAA games you can't run under Linux.
I dont really get the point of the effort people go through trying to make Microsoft products something they're not.
Windows LTSC isn't broken, or minimal... it's LTS! It's stable and more likely to remain so.
> the point of the effort
Installing LTSC takes exactly as long as installing any other version of Windows 10. Although maybe there are slightly fewer nag screens, and post-install it's much, much easier to support as there are no unnecessary feature upgrades.
> I run Linux for my work
For what it's worth, the Linux:Windows install ratio in the home is something like 2:1, although if we start counting VMs then it's more like 5:1
Having both Linux and Windows messes with muscle memory unless you have found a way to get them to behave exactly the same.
A PC with Windows 10 LTSC beats PS5/Xbox in terms in game availability and backwards compatibility. It also unsurprisingly still beats Linux + Proton in terms of compability. It is still Windows after all. Console gaming is not comparable to PC gaming at this point.
Using LTSC over regular W10 affords you a more stable system since you forgo any feature updates from Microsoft (only security updates), a more lightweight and snappier system with less background services running at startup, and reduced (but still present) telemetry.
Also, I unironically like the Windows UX over the Linux compositors and countless Desktop Environments that endlessly run into compatability issues and weird bugs. W10 LTSC is comparatively far more stable.
For a casual gamer, like myself, I don’t see a point in spending $1500+ on a PC for diminishing returns in performance and game compatibility. It’s also common for new AAA PC releases to be much worse than their console counterparts.
I can cheaply buy used physical games and still have access the vast majority of the Xbox back catalog. 100% of the Xbox One library, 600+ Xbox 360 games, and 90+ Xbox games.
The official Xbox Live servers for these older games are still up and maintained. It’s seamless for my non-technical friends and I to get into a COD MW2 lobby. On PC there are only community servers, and the cheaters are way more common.
I’m not trying to discourage people from PC gaming (I use my Steamdeck quite a bit too).
I think the trade offs only make sense if you spend a significant amount of time gaming, or can get more value out of the PC by using it for productivity.
You can get a PC that can run modern games for far less than $1500; in fact, slapping a ~$200 GPU into a ~$200 office PC will get you 80% of the way there.
> It’s also common for new AAA PC releases to be much worse than their console counterparts.
The opposite is far more common from what I can tell (console versions are botched and have performance issues, f.e., Cyberpunk).
> I can cheaply buy used physical games and still have access the vast majority of the Xbox back catalog. 100% of the Xbox One library, 600+ Xbox 360 games, and 90+ Xbox games.
I can more cheaply buy digital games on Steam, have access to most of the once-Xbox-exclusive games that were inevitably ported to PC by Microsoft, and also play the thousands of PC-exclusive games. I also have access to emulators, and now, Sony is even porting their PlayStation games to PC. Also, Xbox Game Pass works on PC.
> The official Xbox Live servers for these older games are still up and maintained. It’s seamless for my non-technical friends and I to get into a COD MW2 lobby. On PC there are only community servers, and the cheaters are way more common.
I don't play Call of Duty so don't know much about that, but for most games, you will generally always have more server options and legacy game revival projects on PC.
I think the trade off makes sense if you like options. If you just want to play mainstream games like COD, consoles probably make more sense. Frankly, I'm happy that a game I bought on Steam in 2008 still works on my PC in 2024. I'm not happy that I can't play a PS3 game I bought in 2008 on my PS5.
Wasn't that game broken on all platforms?
PS5/Series X: playable, lots of crashes and bugs
PC: playable, some crashes, lots of bugs
I use several specialized film restoration applications which are developed for Windows exclusively.
Nothing comparable exists in the F/OSS world and I'm not prepared to trade work output quality for ideological purity.
Now, if you're asking if I'll pursue competitors (AI written or not) offering the best-in-class tools for what I wish to accomplish, then of course I will, regardless of any potential ideological sacrifices I have to make to get it running.
There was a little bit of sussing you out as a Windows fanboy, but more I was projecting to understand the future power of AI for people like us who use the most effective tools even if they live on Windows.
I actually kind of doubt that companies will go through the back catalog of excellent tools and remake them (people are quite attached to quirks and there’s typically a small market) so is there a tipping point where we muddle through the inconvenience of “No, not quite like that AI, like this” to finally get the same functionality in a way where we are totally independent of Windows? Or will we possibly never reach that point and instead wait however long it takes for AI to handle all the functionality of all the effective tools? It’s a question in the back of my mind.
*I have been using Linux and Wine for over 10 years and while one can technically install whatever Windows software, even if it's on a Windows VM inside of Linux... the experience is lackluster.
Using LTSC arguably takes less effort than the "normal" versions, where you need to deal with all the bloat. In the end, though, they're not that different at all.
1) It’s neither broken nor weird. It’s just that same windows without preinstalled crapware, think XP times. I’m using it since 2018 and never met any version-related issue.
2) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38529637
I don’t get the point of going through this effort either.
I can't recall the name of that Windows version, but it was hugely appealing for the technical minded while it lasted - because it was basically like getting LTSC from Dell/HP/Lenovo (without you having to do the install yourself).
Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -AllUsers -Online
Microsoft.Microsoft3DViewer Microsoft.WindowsCalculator Microsoft.WindowsCamera Clipchamp.Clipchamp Microsoft.WindowsAlarms Microsoft.549981C3F5F10 Microsoft.WindowsFeedbackHub Microsoft.GetHelp Microsoft.WindowsMaps Microsoft.ZuneVideo Microsoft.BingNews Microsoft.WindowsNotepad Microsoft.MicrosoftOfficeHub Microsoft.Office.OneNote Microsoft.Paint Microsoft.MSPaint Microsoft.People Microsoft.Windows.Photos Microsoft.PowerAutomateDesktop MicrosoftCorporationII.QuickAssist Microsoft.SkypeApp Microsoft.ScreenSketch Microsoft.MicrosoftSolitaireCollection Microsoft.MicrosoftStickyNotes Microsoft.Getstarted Microsoft.Todos Microsoft.WindowsSoundRecorder Microsoft.BingWeather Microsoft.ZuneMusic Microsoft.WindowsTerminal Microsoft.Xbox.TCUI Microsoft.XboxApp Microsoft.XboxGameOverlay Microsoft.XboxGamingOverlay Microsoft.XboxIdentityProvider Microsoft.XboxSpeechToTextOverlay Microsoft.GamingApp Microsoft.YourPhone
It's alright but not amazing like the old LTSB was in the days of Windows 7.
In some ways MS still impresses me (WSL, VSCode) but in so many other ways I'm in awe of how bad the Windows experience is. Case in point: try to do some sort of OS config change and get an opaque hex error code. That's it. Google it and pray.
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/979/
I did a quick search, but all of them seem to ask you to contact them for a quote. They claim 50-70% price reductions.
Anyone looking to become a cofounder, with the first order of business being to go in on a pack of LTSC licenses?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/iot-enterprise...