MicrosoftNot that I have to work with the same level of equipment as Tammy104, but I strongly agree. We pay a lot of money each year, and we should be allowed to roll out these other "flavors" of OS when we see fit.
I still think that if you have a Pro key that you should be able to "downgrade" to LTSC or IOT. Yes it would be a "downgrade" because you are removing features. But I get it, you lose the telemetry that is so profitable in these current times. Most Enterprise users are already killing telemetry, even if they are still running Pro on their computers. If it wasn't getting removed with LTSC, I can almost guarantee that I'd be filtering on my firewall!
Back to Tammy's issue, if you drag your feet too long, you are going to push these manufacturers back to Mac OS or Linux. I get this new 5 year path on the 21h2, Windows 10 is only good for another 5 years. But where is 11 LTSC? Give these equipment manufacturers something to work with, it's obvious that building these "stripped down" versions is a known process. If you don't want to do this, how about a bunch of powershell scripts so that the end user can do this for themselves? We all know that there are many portions of this out on the web now, but they fall short and since they aren't official things keep getting changed to bring back the "bloat" that we want gone. Do a Bing search on debloat scripts, very popular subject. Make a white paper on how to do this in the official way, and stick to it.
And last words... We can see that Windows as a Service is going to be the future, so maybe these manufacturers need to get going into a different path right now (I know I'm thinking about how to do this). No way that test equipment can be run on an OS as a service. And do you really want "big pharma" making your vaccine on machines that are constantly getting feature updates that change core operations? Think about that for a moment, think really hard if you don't see the issue.
