How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux

Can't run Windows 11? Don't want to? There are surprisingly legal options

You will have to reinstall everything, but there is another way to escape the end of Windows 10 support in October – and it's cheaper than a new PC.

Happy with Windows 10, but your perfectly capable PC doesn't meet the requirements to run Windows 11? Don't panic. You don't need to buy fresh hardware, or switch to Linux, although obviously that's what The Reg FOSS desk advocates. There are other options, but some are not as widely known as we feel they ought to be.

Yes, you can bypass the compatibility test and upgrade anyway… but there's a chance that an update might stop it working, as it did last year for pre-SSE 4.2 CPUs.

There are two editions of Windows 10 that are not going out of support yet. One has two more years ahead, and another has seven years of updates still to come.

Ever since XP, there have been ever more different editions of Windows. Aside from the 32-bit and 64-bit versions, at launch, Windows 10 came in seven different editions from "Home" to "Enterprise," but all of these are facing the looming October massacre.

Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC looks just like any other version, but gets updates until 2032 – click to enlarge

However, there are other flavors, aimed at business users who don't want to do major in-place updates. They're called the Windows Enterprise Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC). At present, there are four LTSC versions of Windows 10. There's also one of Windows 11, but assuming that you don't want that, then the latest is Windows 10 LTSC 2021, which is a long-term support version of Windows 10 21H2, released in November 2021.

The 2021 LTSC is available in the plain vanilla version, Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021, with end of mainstream support scheduled January 12, 2027, and Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021, with an extended end date of January 13, 2032.

They are not quite the same as the ordinary consumer editions of Windows 10. They don't include the Windows Store or any "modern" apps. Apart from the Edge browser, they have almost nothing else: no OneDrive, no Weather or Contacts apps, and no Windows Mail or whatever it's called this week. For this vulture, all these things sound like significant advantages, although you may disagree. They do include the usual Windows Defender antivirus, though, and the classic accessories such as Notepad and Wordpad.

During installation, they attempt to connect to a Windows enterprise account, but once that fails, they'll offer the option to create a local account instead. Once installed, install updates as usual, then reboot. The first thing to do is to check the activation status. As the LTSC versions are Enterprise editions, a firmware license key for Home or Pro is not enough – you will need an enterprise product key to activate Windows (although workarounds are available for that). If you don't have access to one, you can buy a Volume License Agreement for as few as five machines, and some vendors may be willing to negotiate for single-machine licenses.

There isn't much visible difference between the two versions. Despite its name, the "IoT" edition is the full local client version of Windows. The main difference that struck us was that the IoT edition only offered US English as the system language, although we could choose a UK keyboard layout and region. The plain LTSC version offers 38 different language editions.

(We would be remiss if we did not mention that there is also a Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC edition, which has lower system requirements than the normal Windows 11.)

The main difference with LTSC editions is that they don't receive version upgrades to the OS. You get version 21H2, build 19044, and that's it – forever. To upgrade to a newer build of Windows, you will need to reinstall the OS and all your apps. But since there won't be any further versions of Windows 10 after this year – 22H2 was the last – that's not such a big drawback.

You won't find the LTSC versions on the regular Microsoft download page. If you want to give it a test run, there are evaluation Enterprise ISO files, but these are time-bombed. But, once you own an enterprise license, you can log in to the Microsoft portal page and get them that way.

For hoi polloi, the easiest way is probably from the cheerfully named MASsgrave. This has LTSC ISO files for all the regions, and for the IoT editions, and you can check the MD5SUMs – for instance, via this handy screenshot. This page does include tools to activate the Enterprise edition on any hardware, but use of these may violate Microsoft's licensing terms and applicable laws. The Register does not condone and cannot recommend that. Even a five-machine volume license costs less than a well-specced PC. ®

Bootnote: The third-party remixes

There are some unauthorized third-party Windows "distributions" out there as well. Back in the mists of the Noughties, we used NLite to create our own stripped-down installation ISO for XP Professional. Then we discovered the far smaller TinyXP, and switched to that instead, running it in a VM for years. But this was about 20 years back, when a few apps that were important to us didn't run on Linux. NLite's successor, NTLite, still allows the same sorts of customizations.

There have been further products along the same lines as TinyXP, although sadly, Tiny7 never got updated to SP1. The latest in that extended family is Tiny11 from "NTDEV." In the same style, there are also Atlas OS, ReviOS, and Windows X-Lite, among others. We haven't tried any of them, to be honest, in part because we don't normally run Windows anyway, and in part because we're not gamers and aren't that worried about performance tweaks. Also, be aware that using modified Windows builds may breach Microsoft's terms of service.

It's possible there will be an LTSC version based on 22H2, the last update to Windows 10, and there may also be LTSC-based remix "distros" like in the preceding paragraph.