I just can't understand why Microsoft can just remove all this shit from windows 11. Guys we don't want adds, one drive and all that crap I know you make money on it but let people come to it naturally when it's forced it turns us a way. I keep hearing stories of entire medical offices, small businesses going mac/linux for the sake of not being forced to candy crush it up.
Windows Enterprise/LTSC/IoT (effectively all names for the same thing) are the product offerings delivering what you want. When I need Windows, it’s what I use.
It’s available for $238 from CDW.com or less from resellers.
If you want to play games, you have to do a tiny bit of extra work to get the right frameworks/drivers installed, especially for VR. But this isn’t done to frustrate you, it’s because this version of windows doesn’t come with anything that’s strictly helpful, and Activity Monitor shows a blissfully low number of processes running on first boot. If you want bells and whistles, you’re free to add them yourself.
Note that you're likely paying $238 and still not getting a legit copy of Windows. If you don't have a volume license agreement and a minimum of 5 Windows licenses, you aren't supposed to use the LTSC version of Windows, and they're not supposed to be used for primary desktops. Also you're supposed to have a Pro license for the machine BEFORE you buy LTSC, so that's just more extra costs. You might as well just save the money and pirate it. Not that this will make any difference in practice if you're just using it at home, but still, people should probably know this.
I believe you can buy individual copies from a reseller who buys copies in bulk and they are able to create keys in their own licensing portal to resell individually. I believe CDW either is a reseller or partners with Advantech.
If the cost is the issue, I'd probably go for gray-market reseller keys over pirating. Looks like they run $6-20 these days, someone could simply search for "windows 11 iot keys" to see offerings - pick whichever site either seems the least shady or is cheap enough that you're okay losing the money. Always use something like privacy.com to protect your CC info when buying gray-market software keys.
I believe there are bona-fide tools given to large org IT personnel to re-license installed windows as whatever you want, but if you don't have a trusted friend who can provide a trustworthy copy of that, I wouldn't trust anything pirated that claims to do the same thing. There are also open-source tools on Github which can perform the tasks of a KMS and license your copy of Windows as whatever version you want.
> It’s available for $238 from CDW.com or less from resellers.
Tried a while ago and my purchase was rejected as I wasn't a company (and also entered dubious location info since they only supported the US which I don't live in, probably leading to taxes issue. But the main reason they gave was that the purchase was reserved to companies).
