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Learn more Buy Now. To deliver on the commitment of no changes to features or functionality, a Windows 10 LTSC release does not contain any of the components of Windows 10 that may change over the life of the release. We create a new LTSC release approximately every three years, and each release contains all the new capabilities and support included in the Windows 10 features updates that have been released since the previous LTSC release. Unlike the year-and-month terminology employed to describe Windows 10 features updates e.
Each LTSC release receives 10 years of servicing and support [i]. During the life of a LTSC release, you can upgrade your devices to the next or latest LTSC release free of charge using an in-place upgrade, or to any currently supported release of Windows As with the Semi-Annual Channel, LTSC devices receive regular quality and security updates to ensure that device security stays up to date. Before its release and throughout the first year of Windows 10, many predicted that LTSC would be the preferred servicing channel for enterprise customers.
This has turned out not to be the case, and the SAC is the predominant choice for enterprises today. There are several reasons why using the LTSC can turn out to be the wrong fit for the Windows 10 devices in an organization. For example, one organization deployed LTSC to bring forward the same IT rules and image creation and management processes they had used since Windows XP, in this case to new Surface devices.
Another reason some organizations chose to adopt the LTSC centered around application compatibility. In talking with some of these organizations; however, initial concerns about application compatibility from release to release in their environment have proved to be a non-issue.
All too often, I have seen strategic decisions about Windows 10 servicing options and the use of the Long-Term Servicing Channel driven by the wrong criteria; for example, IT professional familiarity prevailing over end user value and impact. The LTSC is designed for devices and use cases where features and functionality will not change. It provides 10 years of security servicing to a static Windows 10 feature set.
If you are considering the LTSC for devices in your organization, please consider the following:. The Long-Term Servicing Channel a tool designed for a specific job. If you understand the considerations listed above, have secured hardware and support to align with the intended duration of usage, and have secured support for your applications, the LTSC can provide your organization with years of secure, static operation, with full servicing and support for its year lifespan.
You tell that preferred choice is changing in the industry? Any approximate numbers? And what about "stability" flop of ? I doubt any serious org has started even testing and i feel will be released just after most update to the latest version. Btw, is there x64 only feature update for in WSUS finally?
A few weeks ago there was none. Why advertise new cool feature like 2 times smaller update size by splitting update into x86 and x64 and only providing packages for older versions? I think LTSC believers won't disappear soon, as many may prefer stability real stability over theoretical improvements and possible problems. If anything, they numbers may grow after the blunder.
You over estimated LTSC usage. Let me use a 3rd party source, so we remove any concern I'm trying to cook the books :. Other then servers and special purpose devices, it really is the exception today, and for desktop productivity usage, movement is from it, to SAC. He is a small subset, organized by release, of the featurs and functionality added in subsequent SAC releases. I would submit for your consideration based on real data telemetry, and actual innovation we have added that I know the subsequent SAC builds are even more stable, better performant, and more secure.
We will continue to work to address your servicing concerns and challenges, and hope that in the near future, we can make it work for you. In our industry kind of Software development we are using hundreds of different "bot" machines. Automated testing, compiling, building, etc systems. Most of those are still running older versions of Windows. Because people responsible for those processes doesnt have absolute certainity, that those routines work fine after every SAC upgrade.
For those systems most of end-user features and functionalities introduced with new W10 release are pointless. So, for IT is very hard to sell them idea- to screw twice per year all their systems.
They have much important jobs to perform than test compatibility with next W10 release. We are trying to keep our user stations on more recent versions - it cost us lot time resources and end-users dont understand why it is needed. Yes, most changes on paper sound cool for IT enthusiasts, but not so interesting for end users, who maybe just work with a few spreadsheets and docs and not so into technology. They don't care about timeline, or doing screenshots with new app or connecting their phones to PC, etc.
Main reason for IT to install it is to keep up to date, to have monthly cumulative updates weight less and to get IT updates like better Autopilot support and new policies, etc. This is specifically mentioned in the article. All that is proved here is that Microsoft Update is extremely aggressive in Windows As for LTSC vs SAC: I would much rather spend the time to build a new image every year or so as new LTSC versions are released when the alternative is to have the user experience across the organization be turned upside down every six months as workflows change in Windows.
That's before considering the major stability issues that seem to be plaguing the SAC branch on a regular basis. In our organization, the most unstable machines by far are among the three that run SAC vs the many hundreds running LTSB at the time of writing.
These types of posts really upset me. You want consumers and IT Admins to stop resorting to an OS you say is intended for medical devices and kiosks?
Then stop consistently putting out versions of Windows 10 that break NICs, lose data, reboot sans warning, and come pre-loaded with adware like candy Crush, xbox apps, start menu ads, lock screen ads, and 2 browsers. Can I ask why even Microsoft hasn't been able to untangle IE from their own "latest and greatest" rendition of Windows 10?
Lest we forget that a large portion of the Win10 market share came from Microsoft imaging entire organizations overnight with clandestine Windows 7 updates sometime around early People have older hardware that needs to be able to run mission critical, legacy software. Cortana and the App Store have no place on the majority of many workshop machines.
Stop using paying customers as beta testers. Can I ask what exactly happened to Patch Tuesday? Because for the last year, at least, updates have gone through no QA team and come down the channel seemingly at random. Occasional out of band patches are fine. Building the plane as it's taking off and then yelling at your passengers for deploying their parachutes when you hit turbulence is a good way to have an entire organization shift away from your airline. One key element that haven't been touched in this article is the capability of the features in Windows 10 from to , John posted a nice Picture of all the new features that has been added to Windows 10, and some ppl mock those and say that their users does'nt need to connect their phone or whatever.
But they miss a vital Point and that's the capability of the said feature, for example Delivery Optimization "DO" the functionality of that so important feature has vastly imoproved since launch, and that's not the only feature that has been improved. If your on LTSC for the 10 year support, god knows what all background functionality you will miss out on. Being on LTSC for a longer time will also get you further behind the real World so when the day comes to upgrade to say LTSC you might find yourself in a situation where your dev team has been quietly developing with VS and all of a sudden you have a migration Project on the scale of Windows XP to Windows 7.
Ofcource there are systems that are best being left alone from the fast paced outside World, but they are few and far apart. Sure the quality in Microsoft releases have gone down since they fired thier whole QA team, so please MS rethink! Actually, that's exactly what i meant in my comment, that users don't care for user features, so the only incentive for IT admins to install updates every 6 months is to stay secure and to get those hidden to the eye improvements DO, Autopilot, etc.
They need something useful they can get their hands on. As they don't get it, they are just annoyed with often updates that take long to install and don't see point in that.
You want me to explain spreadsheet users how great recent DO improvements were? Of course, you can have an argument that it can save internet traffic cost and make less impact on network in DO case.
But on my previous job updates were handled via WSUS and we had unlimited broadband internet, so DO wouldn't do much for us. Anyway, IT admins are now tasked to do big updates twice a year, users don't see value in this. Background improvements are neat, if you have real use for them, but in the end, companies need a stable and secure OS to do work by secure i mean just monthly security updates.
This can be reduced to 1 update per year. MS is touting Autopilot and Intune to be that next "image" deployment tool not really an image in the regular sense, just a set of settings that will prepare Windows for work. But i can't see this being used in public sector where you don't know who will win new PC shipment tender.
Could be some smallish local retailer who never heard about Autopilot. Is the meaning right, that i will get each LTSC upgrade within ten years for free??? That will be a great feature. John, very nice overview. In fact in-place upgrades are prevented with the LTSC edition and it does require the purchase of a full new upgrade license.
WindowsChamp beat me to it. So, we have big Enterprise organization. Yep, one of those big ones that everyone knows. And of course just like everyone else on this planet scared of staying on W7 because soon will be not supported, and as result non-compliance, audit, regulators and big, big fines! Does not sound good! So started moving with SAC. Well, because it was 1 year ago. Now got Yes, it was mess! In fact it was disaster. You were saying 09 means September?
Yeah right! How about November? October was bug-fixes time ha-ha-ha! Halloween of bugs. But as you know, November is the time when things slow down. Well, many reasons. First it is new fiscal year. First month is always slow. Besides everybody is in the Christmas mood. Santa coming to town in case you did not know. Then it is January, best time to go Dominican, Mexico or Cuba - prices doing down!
Who does not like cheap vacation all-inclusive? Then February things start picking-up slowly. But hey, now business got scary, they want to test their Applications, but they don't have time. And you know, all those 3rd party agents? Security agents? Have you heard about them? They also may not work in So if we push we may break all machines.
Risk is real, and everybody scary. But things not getting any better. Soon it will be and it only will be worse. So this is a road to perdition. What you suggest? Stay on or jump to ? What if something happens?
It will be the END. And nobody want the END. Everybody want to live. Everyone want to retire happy ha-ha-ha! Now let's see why SAC is better as per you list : 1. Edge is missing. But Edge is disaster. You saying add this to ADFS? But do you remember we were talking about large enterprise?
Don't ask. Just believe! So for any changes we are looking months and months to implement. We disabled it in SAC anyway, so why bother?
Nobody use Cortana, except MS people who present something on Ignite! App Store. Most enterprise block it - otherwise this is a Pandora box! If users start installing what they want this will be the end! Same thing for many other things. So what really business need? They need their Applications.
And they want them to work stable today, tomorrow and in 5 years, day after day. And if changes occurs so often and could break things, this is not good. Your turn! Just adding my two cents here. Most users keep their devices for an average of 5 years.
That would mean users get a new Windows version every time they change their PC as opposed to disrupting them every year or so at the risk of breaking their applications. To all those LTSC issues raised in the article, they all have a workaround or alternative so they are of no concern and I can safely dismiss them as fear-mongering designed to fit Microsoft's agenda.
After all, let's look at who wrote the article. The author conveniently failed to even take a peek at the recent series of upgrade disasters and delays Microsoft is facing. I think it is evident Microsoft can't keep up with their own agenda, which has hurt their credibility. If they are to be successful at repairing the damage, first they have to earn our trust before we can take their agenda seriously by releasing stable and trustworthy upgrades that are consistently on time.
Constant delays is a clear sign of trouble. If MS can't keep up with their own pace, what makes anyone think that the average enterprise will be able to do the same? We just don't have the resources to go around every 6 months upgrading machines. If they slowed down the release pace to maybe once a year, and support those releases for up to 5 years, I believe Microsoft might be able to keep up with the pace, they won't stumble as much, make it much easier for enterprises, significantly reduce the push back, and have a much more successful Win 10 upgrade path.
MS is surprisingly quiet about the 19H2 update and there are rumors it might be very minor stability update instead of a regular feature update. Although i would just scrap it and go the 1 update per year route. Nah, that's too long. Especially with laptops. They get beaten up badly if used as laptops and carried around a lot. And they get morally old. We use the LTSC version.
I originally went the route of Enterprise and had so many problems:. Why, if they are turned OFF. We want stability, clean and lean OS that is quick and for work. The adoption of new "Features" should always be an individual companies decision, not Microsofts.
All non-required features are just applications that bloat the OS and increase management. We don't have the staff to deal with, 6monthly Feature updates, which technically are "inplace-upgrades" and all their consistencies.
I think the 3yr rotation was good, 2yrs of stability. We skipped all of Windows 8. Now I have to upgrade the OS every 2 years just to keep security updates coming down the pipe? We just did an internal NESSUS vulnerability scan and 18 machines on and earlier came up on the report for being end of life. It used to be we bought a generation of computer preloaded with an OS like Win 7 then 5 or 6 years later those computers would be refreshed with a newer model and a newer OS like Win If you want to do feature updates fine, but keep those security updates coming down the wire.
Keith, it might help first updating to older build. Some PCs here were failing to upgrade from to Yeah, it was giving a confusing error that "some driver is incompatible". No exact name, error, nothing. Just a button to proceed anyway. If i proceed, it works ok after the update.
But this requires manual intervention. Surprisingly this works, if you first update to and then to So for failing machines i'm using this approach. Btw, we also have machines and it seems they are not going to be updated soon as application is not compatible with newer versions of Windows and there are also some political decisions to be made to move on.
I know that MS now has so many versions on their hands to support all of them for at least 5 years. But hey, there is the LTSC version to avoid this problems, no?
Happy to help, I hear frustration in your feedback, but missing a lot of details that I might help with. Some initial thoughts, feel free to engage with specifics if you would like help.
There are literally millions of devices that do this every day, consumer, slam business and large enterprise. You did not indicate with SKU you are using, but I'll assume pro is you are focused on the 18 month security servicing for each release. I work with many enterprise customers other than Microsoft who update s of devices weekly, some even more. What are the limits that you running into and effecting that velocity?
The customer trend I do see is that once you get process in place to update once every 12 months, then updating more frequently, if you choose is incremental. Most of the change management is completed in getting to update more frequent than every years, ie once per year. How do you manage updates? Windows 10 will certainly outlive the HW, but while it does so, it is extending the life of that HW.
Tell me more? Have you check free diskspace? This is one of the most common sources of update failures, lacking free space to download and install the updates.
Do you have 3rd party encryption and security products that might be conflicting? Many then, fewer today still, required you to first uninstall, update the 3rd party tools before the update, though I would expect you would have worked through this with other devices that did update, so check disk space.
Have you used the Setup Diag tool? Tell me more about the "drastic change" breaking your application. If this is the case, by all means, take advantage of our App Assure program, no cost to you, and we will correct or help re-mediate the issue for you. I'm not sure if i can disclose such information even the name in-house app.
What i meant, that one might assume that going from March version to September one can expect it to be mostly compatible. This seems like might be such example.
Although looking at Insider builds there are still a bunch of changes, not just small fixes. I'll be very clear. If you have an app that is using undocumented calls, or other non-supported approaches, no-promises.
It's often the little things that are annoying. I don't have a large deployment but every release there is something that takes time to fix and track down.
I had to repair the pdf printer for a LOB app. It's typically something relating to printing, one time it was an Outlook app that stopped working and I had to repair it. At home I've lost my hdmi display to my Lenovo docking station and this isn't a cheap laptop either. To be honest, I really do not see how you have such a big issue keeping up to date on Windows First off, LTSC is a bad choice for close to every user in any case, to many potential pitfalls and limitations.
Managing computers without management tools is not easy, but if your are serious you should also be serious managing your computers, making sure they are up to date and compliant. With an increasing degree of travel and out of office usage, as well as interaction with external systems and users, firewalls are not the most important point of security any more, the endpoint is.
Not having absolute control of the endpoint can turn out more expensive than you might think. I'm using a combination of SCCM and Intune managing endpoints, and as a single admin I manage thousands of devices, Windows, iOS and Android, in a more diverse, both geographically and methodically, environment than most other businesses. As for the issues, well, I did not experience any.
Nor did I have any issues with any other release either. My impression is, most people did not have any issues, but a small percentage of close to a billion devices is still many systems and users. When the new release is out, I wait a few weeks before I update a small set of test computers in my office. I do some testing trying to provoke some errors, while also looking for people having issues online, trying to identify HW and SW setups common for our environment.
I then deploy for the entire organisation. All data is stored off device, and a full device rollback takes about one hour, should something go bad. So far I've had issues with one upgrade on one computer, out of several thousands. And, after redeploying the OS, every update since were ok.
In a perfect world we would have more people testing every computer type with every software before deploying the upgrades, but needless to say, this is not possible with just one person managing clients. At some point, something might go wrong, we all know this.
But we have disaster recovery plans, and most users can do a OSD from their own desk getting the system operational within the hour. We find that keeping the endpoints secure and compliant is more important in the long run. Andres Pae Nobody said do not use LTSC, and your example of static, automated systems, conducting the same tasks over and over, with little use of new features, doing nothing but these specific tasks, well this could be one of the use cases where LTSC is the best choice.
Just think it through first. Serpentbane, but that is the point. Microsoft made it very hard on Windows 10 to get rid of things the Organization does not want - things like setting file associations etc. Also, we deploy our devices for a four year cycle, and by using LTSC, we could just deploy these devices and keep them on one version for the entire Lifecycle - no changes, no stuff breaking. It is the little things that happen with the Windows 10 updates - defaults get changed, they add new icons to the task bar I had a ton of support calls when the unwanted "Mail" App was auto-pinned to the taskbar with upgrades , the interface is changing constantly looking at you, Windows Search Neither do we want that as Admins.
Also, people HATE when the upgrades arrive. And I have trouble forcing my users to have a single reboot a month as it is IT had to override Management on that one. Just remember that back on any other version of Windows, you only had to worry about deploying to a device once, have it auto-configured by whatever scripts you built, and only worry about the monthly updates. Now, with every new Windows 10 version I have to verify that my scripts still work PSA: often they get broken by changes from Microsoft , I have to verify my Drivers and Software all still work, figure out where Microsoft changed the presets set by users in the upgrade process, where they added unwanted "features" and GUI elements, update my GPOs Administering Windows 10 devices to a level that my Organization wants not to a level that Microsoft deems "suitable" creates about five times as much work as Windows 7 or Windows XP did before.
I know, a lot of people seem to like Edge, Cortana, etc..
