Update 7/15/2019: The content in this post applies to PC and laptop type devices converted to Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, and not devices purchased with Windows 10 IoT Enterprise pre-installed. Exam...
Updated Jul 15, 2019
Version 5.0
Blog Post
Hi John,
Where I work (A housing association with around 150 staff and a small IT team) I'm still in the middle of rolling out Windows 10 in a VMware VDI environment. Ever since initially looking into rolling out W10 years ago I have ached so much to be able to just use the LTSC release and get on with it.
You say that the LTSC is intended for environments where use cases and requirements don't change over time. My response to this is that empiraclly speaking, we simply don't use any "features" of the OS itself to drive our organisation forward. Our business needs are met by software vendors developing applications that we simply install on our base image or run via web-apps, not by the OS itself. Our security needs are catered for in our infrastructure itself and again by third party solutions. I'd also wager that this is what a majority of businesses need, nothing more than a simple platform on which they can build to their own requirements, not Microsoft's.
I welcome additional features in the name of security but there appears to be no allowing here for IT admins to make their choices and not have to feel like they're being punished for it.
I've fought too much against changing behaviours in Windows 10 releases where I need to find new services to disable for performance reasons or where something I did in a Group Policy for one release is undone by another. I've got file associations being reset anytime a user moves to a new VM that are an absolute pain to manage. UWP replacements for stock Windows apps are no longer simple to manage because they're "provisioned" on a per-user basis rather than just being "installed". I can't get "Photos" for crying out loud to open an image for any user without staring at a blank window for 10-15 seconds. The classic image viewer? Perfect... but also gone now (without resorting to registry hackery). I could go on and on and on. It constantly feels like a battle with Windows 10 and I'm exhausted with it!
What we'd love is to be able to use LTSC as our base image, install exactly what we need and just get on. SAC goes completely against this.