Hacker News Reader

I don't want to motivate anyone to switch back to Windows (because Microsoft), but for anyone who doesn't want to or can't switch, but also doesn't want to endure Microsoft's chosen way of entirely ignoring user needs but instead focusing on squeezing money out of them through ads and the collection of user data in Windows 10 and 11, check out the Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC version! It's still supported 'til 2031 iirc. Plus, as it's meant to Enterprises and IoT systems, it's stripped from all the ads, bloatware, and what not. When I installed it first one year ago, I was just sad that I didn't know it earlier. It's everything I ever wanted Windows to be: lean, fast, and (somewhat) minimalistic, at least compared to stock Windows 10.

Can't 100% say whether Windows 11 IoT LTSC is equally good, but from what I've read it also is worth considering.

The fact that this is even brought up as a solution really speaks to how bad Windows is.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-...

> after you install Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC Evaluation, you won't be able to use the recovery partition on your PC to go back to your previous version of Windows.

Yikes.

You're "supposed" to acquire LTSC through non-official means, not using the evaluation ISO.

So the only way to use Windows, is to use a version that's designed for IoT, and only available through enterprise channels?

It's really selling itself...

That's routine. Windows generally ends up nuking the OEM partitions if you do golden installs.

> after you install Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC Evaluation, you won't be able to use the recovery partition on your PC to go back to your previous version of Windows.

I was already sold; you don't have to convince me.

this is the meme you want:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/harry-you-dont-need-to-sell-i...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNOa5Uvjpwo

The fact that this is even brought up as a solution really speaks to how bad Windows is.

i was going to say something similar. the fact that a version of windows that is designed for IoT devises is still usable as a desktop is absolutely ridiculous. imagine using OpenWRT as a desktop...

It's not designed for IoT devices per se, the naming is just terrible. A comparison to OpenWrt is not warranted here, although to reiterate, the naming is terrible.

but IoT is one of the use cases it is designed for, isn't it? regardless of the naming, suggesting to use a desktop system for IoT is ridiculous.

the comparison to OpenWRT is warranted, if microsoft expects me to run this system on devices that i would otherwise run OpenWRT on.

>It's not designed for IoT devices per se, the naming is just terrible.

IoT was the buzzword of the year when W10 released.

Yeah, bad naming is all it is.

In a way, it is for "IoT" devices...but enterprisey things. Where I work we have it on a few devices that I guess you could call an "IoT" device. Unattended driver kiosks for truck scales, manufacturing equipment that requires windows, industrial control panels, etc.

That's what it is for. A lot of this stuff uses really old software, some of which the vendor doesn't even exist anymore, and it only runs on Windows so these control panels and devices need windows (unless you manage to get some of it working on wine but that's usually not viable in these cases).

So yeah, it's supposed to be a full desktop, because these devices often require it to some extent, albeit a little slimmed down and LTS.

I think HN would be surprised to learn just how many devices run windows out there in the world outside of silicon valley. Windows is everywhere you'd hope never to see it running at.

well, i am not surprised that anything with a GUI would run some form of windows, even ATMs. i would not have categorized them as IoT devices though, but fair point.

That's a bit harsh.

The recovery partition has some value. But in an OS reinstall scenario Windows.old is a much more helpful feature.

However, these features won't used by someone installing Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC Evaluation (Evaluation just means that it's 90 day free trial version). This is because to aquire the non-trial version of the OS you must either be willing to license Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC from Microsoft, or crack the activation. If you crack Windows you do not need the 90 day free trial! And any company which has institutional knowledge of what an LTSC edition is, is capable of running the 90 day trial in a non destructive way (pro tip: put your new OS on a new drive and keep your old drive in a drawer).

Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC is the best version of Windows 11 I have ever tried, no contest.

My theory is that Microsoft offers LTSC IoT in part as a bone to throw the vocal complainants (read: people who use HN) - and that the terrible name is to dissuade standard users.

I just reinstalled my own system with a combination of LTSC and Linux (currently looking at a riced Hyprland on CachyOS) with the understanding that there will be occasional annoyances (but still less so than consumer W11)

I haven't used it, but is Win 11 Pro ad-free?

Pro isn't ad-free by default. With appropriate regedits/privacy scripts/tools you can make it ad-free until an update inevitably reverts/"upgrades" some part of it. It's not hard to maintain it in this state but you are fighting against what microsoft wants the OS to be when you do this.

I've never had a Windows update revert anything like that. I turned this stuff off 3 years ago and haven't had to do anything since. I think this is just FUD that people earnestly believe and repeat because it sounds like something they think Microsoft would do.

Every upgrade you have have to go back and turn/GPO off various Copilot, MSN ads-in-your-start-menu and MSFT Rewards (the f that even is?) things. Same thing for Edge; drove me back to firefox.

An easy example, if you haven't already try going to GPO and enable 'Computer Configuration>Start Menu and Taskbar>Remove Recommended Section from Start Menu' then restart your computer. Open the start menu and be amazed that people weren't actually complaining about FUD as you witness a nice fossilized example of updates superseding users previous choices.

You can hunt out the other newer superseding settings (good luck without a 3rd party script or guide as you won't find required settings and steps to remove it in any MS docs just scattered parts) and eventually neuter the recommended section again... possibly as you suggest forever or possibly until an update touches this again.

Can a legitimate LTSC licence be bought by a standard user? I couldn't manage it and instead had to resort to Windows Server 2025.

It is a tiny bit of a mess to setup on gaming computers because of lack of drivers (for the drivers which cannot be downloaded from the manufacturer site, need to get a Windows 11 install, let it download/install all the drivers as needed, then use pnputil to export them and import them in Windows Server) but I did manage to find a likely-legitimate seller (referenced on the Microsoft website as a partner) selling licenses for legitimate-looking prices. The price goes up with the amount of cores, happy I didn't have a Threadripper.

Also some issues here and there (such as needing a registry change to enable clipboard history, Meta Link not supporting showing the desktop or headset audio (could maybe use the pnputil trick for that)) that I didn't have with the LTSC evaluation.

Same experience, but from using 11 in a VM. Installing it is eye opening, with all the unskippable Eulas that force you to agree to share your data.

I’m convinced it’s a frog in boiling water situation for people still using windows. It’s so bad.

Hear me out: MS Excel. The one true powerful version only exists on Windows. Another anchor: ODBC drivers. Some good SQL Server connectivity options are only available on Windows. When your captive audience is accountants, traders, and CFOs, it's quite a moat.

And then, somehow, the desktop Outlook is better on mac than on Windows.

On Windows I can't even easily copy/paste from one email to another. It strips out half the formatting and any colors that were there. Nor can I copy email recipients from an email into a new one.

I tried switching to Windows last year and I just couldn't do it. So now my expensive and fancy powerful laptop collects dust and I'm back to my 5 year old m1 (which is somehow faster, usually).

Windows Excel in Parallels on Mac is the best option I have found.

You mean the software that can't open 2 differents files if they have the same name ?

my favprite notfavorite win11 feature is that they broke keyboard layout switching, permanently. It has been reported as an unsolved bug for nearly two years now :-/. in 25+ years, I had been taking it for granted to work correctly. Apparently nobody in Redmond uses the feature.. I am european, and (try to) use it minutes apart. As an extra bonus, MS Teams regularly either ignores keyboard switch, or switches 50% broken, half the keys. But what can you expect, from an app which is a selfupdating web server that installs itself with squirrel :-/

I switched my spare PC from Linux back to Win10, and it's way less annoying than I remember (rug bazaar was right). Maybe because it's not getting constant updates anymore.

The Windows 11 home version has all the adware garbage. The Pro version is cleaner.

There are debloat scripts for Win11 that are pretty effective. I use this one: https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

Only issue is that Windows will periodically re-bloat itself - so you have to re-run it after more or less every quarterly windows update.

The only thing remaining that I want to remove but cannot get rid of is edge. Removing edge is only available in the EU for $ome in$ane rea$on. You might be able to get an EU ISO for installation? Unclear to me but I haven’t dug too deeply.

I was willing to give Edge a chance years ago. I didn’t see a compelling enough reason to switch, so I stuck with Firefox. However, while troubleshooting some problems on a family member’s PC I got to see what a ‘default’/‘opt in to everything’ Edge experience is like in 2025.

It’s horrifying. Edge is jam-packed with bloat and the entire browser is geared towards monitoring and hoarding every scrap of user interaction that passes through it. The worst part is that the average person likely has no idea just how pervasive Microsoft’s spying and ad-targeting is.

I envy the fact that EU Citizens have the right to decline all of these intrusive “features” foisted upon them by Microsoft. I doubt Congress would ever come close to affording us a fraction of these same consumer rights. Sigh.

Imagine any other thing treating you like this. Once a week, your IKEA cupboard locks itself and repairs some factory defects. You want something? Tough. Once every half an hour, it opens a random hatch and drops a ton of paper on the floor, full of IKEA ads. It has all kinds of cameras to see if it can sell you other IKEA stuff, but pinky promise, they don't sell images to others, except 700 partners. And every company in the world is petrified of fear about using other cupboards. But good news, here is some stuff a friend of a friend gave you, that stops all this. Mostly. For a month.

The forced reinstalls for updates is the worst. Sometimes when working on some Excel file etc at night, I went away without saving (e.g. crying kid needs attention, and I never returned). Auto-saving only works when you store files in OneDrive. So then windows Update will shut down Excel, and Excel often won't create an AutoSave, and then hours of work are lost -- totally intentionally, deliberately, all using Microsoft products that are apparently specifically designed to make you lose hours of work.

Who designs these antipatterns!?

The forced restarts are mind boggling.

What is an operating system? At it's core, an OS is a program to run other programs. Yet this Windows program likes to randomly kill all the programs it's supposed to keep running, at night, when it thinks you aren't looking. It literally fails at the most basic purpose of an operating system.

If they didn't force restart then the patches they release for vulnerabilities would never take effect. What normal user restarts their PC other than when they're having issues?

Maybe they could stop building the OS in such a way that it requires reboots? You know that other operating systems can manage without that, right?

> You know that other operating systems can manage without that, right?

Not for kernel updates (Linux, by default), and not for macOS which is now RO root fs and also requires a reboot because updates are image based, a. la. Fedora Silverblue.

Also FWIW, Windows now has hotpatching, albeit not available to consumers, it's attached to enterprise licensing

You can update the Linux kernel without killing userspace. Granted it's not without reboot though. Just hibernate/suspend to disk and choose a different kernel on startup, it will still load the RAM image just fine; every program will be still running.

> Windows now has hotpatching,

That's kind of my point. Linux is free and can manage, but 40 year old Windows, which is valued to be worth more than the GDP of many nations can't?

They just aren't trying very hard because they don't have to.

I don't see how it's possible to actually support that considering how many components make up an OS. What would happen if libc had a vulnerability that needed patching? I know a reboot wouldn't be forced but wouldn't it only take effect when all the processes using it restart?

Windows has been around for 40 years, and is worth more than the GDP of many nations. In fact, some of the Windows server versions actually include the feature.

It's not that it's an impossible problem, it's that Microsoft doesn't have to compete...so they don't.

> some of the Windows server versions actually include the feature

If you looked into it though you'd see that you do still need to restart at least every quarter for baseline updates. If you don't restart then future hotpatch updates will not apply because they only target the current baseline update. There are also unplanned baseline updates that require a restart to patch zero-day exploits that cannot be fixed in a hotpatch.

I'm still not understanding how this is a solved problem on Linux. If there is a vulnerability in libc then you need to restart (probably) all processes to have the fix take effect.

> m still not understanding how this is a solved problem on Linux. If there is a vulnerability in libc then you need to restart (probably) all processes to have the fix take effect.

Restarting the service that was directly impacted by the patch is preferable to the 1980's techno-brained idea of rebooting the entire system. Most of the time it isn't glibc.

FWIW - I did recently read that hotpatching is already there in 11 if you enable it in an enterprise. Fingers crossed it comes to home users.

The reason I brought up libc is there are a lot more userspace shared libraries in Windows that could need patching.

Straight out of shitty user stories.

As a user I want my computer to restart by itself and lose of my work, because its entire purpose is to collect CVE patches.

> It literally fails at the most basic purpose of an operating system.

Either you've misunderstood who the customer is, or Microsoft has.

Mightn't AutoRecover have found a version of your old sheet?

If AutoRecover worked reliably. Excel is only like 40 years old, so AutoRecover doesn’t work reliable yet.

Designed to force you to buy a OneDrive subscription? I bet relevant revenue numbers went slightly but noticeably up when this was introduced. Sweet promotion package stuff!

(Also, say early, save often.)

In the early days of Windows 10, it was even worse because the updates could brick your windows install and you would get stuck on a blue screen or a boot loop after it forced you to restart. I've had to reinstall W10 at least a dozen time because of bad updates.

I personally liked the W8 approach to updates. You were allowed to set windows update in a mode that would notify you of new updates but you got to chose when to download/install them. That setting as also permanent and they didn't "accidentally" revert it back during an update.

This has happened with every version of Windows. NT4 SP6 was a nightmare and recommended to skip because it would cause a BSOD. Microsoft had to release SP6a about a month later.

Updates and unbootable systems are nothing new, to treat any OS as a unicorn in this respect is ignoring past history. Happens with Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Just a data point on the "modern suspend" feature. I have a Win11/Fedora dual boot laptop. Fedora doesn't do modern suspend, at least on that machine. Found that deep, deep down in the "BIOS" (yes, I know, UEFI) menus - so deep that you have to do a secret keyboard dance to even get that menu - is a "enable S3 sleep" option. Figured OK, I'll just get good suspend in Linux and whatever in Windows.

Surprise! Windows 11 likes S3 suspend just fine. Push the button, instant screen off and winking power light... push it again, instant wakeup. So if by some miracle your hardware/UEFI still supports it, you're good. This is a 5-year-old-ish Acer Swift 3 for what it's worth.

Oh, wait, you mean Windows update toggles that setting back? Whoa.

I had to do the same and ran it in a vm on linux.

> I'd get random garbage like a notification for some "grand prize giveaway"

???

how? what kind of malware did you install? have several W11 boxes, none exhibit this behavior. No "official" notification for a prize give away or any ads.

The malware is Windows 11 itself. It's an official Microsoft thing https://rewards.bing.com/sweepstakes/million/about You might not have seen it if the giveaway is not available in your region or if you are using an Enterprise/debloated version.

> The Microsoft Rewards Ultimate Giveaway Sweepstakes isn’t available in your country or region.

ah, cool a region that blocks these business practices... awesome :)