Comment by npteljes
6 hours ago
Try LTSC in case you haven't already. It's the essence of Windows, without most of this user-facing bullshit. They release it for environments where people expect their things to actually work, "like hospitals or kiosks". But, I can attest that it works for gaming as well.
Activation can work with Massgrave, or by you spinning up your own activation emulator, or by pointing your Windows to the myriad other activation emulators across the web. You download the image from Microsoft, install, a bunch of console commands, and you're good to go. Long support and no bullshit.
Oh interesting, never heard of it. I do a bunch of emulation and gaming that sometimes requires esoteric drivers, does video streaming and ofc the latest nvidia driver. Does that windows let users mess with that part of the stack?
LTSC is basically a trimmed-down version of Windows. Whatever is possible in Home, Pro, Enterprise etc, is possible in the LTSC as well. Most of the LTSC surprise comes from the lack of features. For example, I installed the "LTSC N" version back in the day, and that didn't even had codecs, so when I opened Reddit in Firefox, the videos didn't play. But even that was easily amended by just installing a specific update.
In case you want a community around it as well, Reddit was helpful for me.
Thanks! If you have any extra pointers I’ll definitely explore.
Turns out all the Xbox UI stuff require the latest windows insider. If there’s an LTSC version that covers that, it’d be absolutely perfect for my use case!
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