Windows 11 24H2 IoT Enterprise LTSC – what is this beast and what is it good for?
A month ago I wrote an article about the Enterprise G edition created by Microsoft for the Chinese government, which has a lot of unnecessary things disabled. The article attracted a lot of interest, many people need an OS with maximum functionality – if you want to use it, but with the ability to disable everything (or almost everything) unnecessary. The main drawback of the Enterprise G version is that the product policy, written in the digital license, prohibits the installation of any language packs other than Chinese and English. That is, the Russian interface is not easy to achieve. The question arises of choosing another edition.
The Enterprise LTSC version immediately comes to mind as a fully functional version with a long service and support cycle, fortunately for Windows 11 24H2 it leaked back in April. But it turns out that there is a more worthy choice, which we will talk about now. We are talking about the IoT Enterprise LTSC edition. What is it? How is it better than Enterprise LTSC? And how is it worse? How to Russify it and how to activate it? This is what we will talk about today.
Windows IoT (Internet of Things) editions have been around for a long time. I once wrote a big article with the history of Windows 10, there were as many as 15 of them. The situation with IoT is a little simpler, Windows 10 IoT Enterprise versions 2015, 2016, 2019 and 2022 were officially sold. There are also Windows IoT Mobile and even Windows IoT Server. Obviously, Windows 11 could not help but have its own IoT editions. The IoT Enterprise LTSC edition belongs to the long service cycle, is supported for the longest possible time and is intended, in general, for niche devices. But, in fact, it is not much different from the usual Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC. But the differences that exist, frankly speaking, are very attractive.
· Firstly, IoT editions (including IoT Enterprise LTSC) do not check for system requirements. Never mind TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, 2 GB of memory and a single-core processor will be enough (that is, the OS will not break and refuse to install), installation from a flash drive or update starts without checking the hardware;
· The IoT LTSC edition has the longest support cycle, meaning it will receive updates for another ten years without any shamanism. The regular LTSC has 5 years;
· Unlike the regular Enterprise LTSC, which can only be activated with a key or KMS activator (for 180 days), the IoT Enterprise LTSC version supports HardwareID activation – once and for all. As you know, you can activate Windows and Office MAS utilities or even a simple PowerShell script;
· The Product Policy for IoT Enterprise LTSC contains several gems that are not found in almost any other publication:
o TerminalServices-RemoteConnectionManager-MaxSessions – has a value of “2”, as opposed to “1” in all other editions (except for the tricky Enterprise Multisession edition, the license terms of which require an Azure subscription, and there are other restrictions). In Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC, the value was also “1”, – now in Windows 11 IoT you can work on the console with one user, and on Remote Desktop with another, without blocking each other – without third party wrappers and fear of renewal;
o SMBClient-RequireSigningByDefault – has a value of “0”, unlike most other editions, IoT requires signing of SMB traffic by default. That is, there is no compatibility problem with old Windows and non-Windows file resources;
o DeviceUpdateCenter-Supported – has a value of “1”, only for IoT editions can support be configured DeviceUpdateCenter;
o Telemetry-ProcessorModeAllowed – has a value of “0” – a ban on collecting telemetry, all other publications have a value of “1”.
o SecureStartupFeature-Disabled-AutomaticDeviceEncryption – has a value of “1”, does not start encrypting the system disk by default. But the SecureStartupFeature-Enabled-DeviceEncryption key has a value of “1”, that is, if you want to enable encryption manually, the policy allows it;
o ServingStack-License-ReservedStorageAllowed – has a value of “0”, only the IoT edition allocates space in advance for OS updates;
· I will tell separately for those who do not like the Microsoft Edge browser. In IoT LTSC it is present and is not removed by default. But according to the requirements of the European Commission, it can be removed in the Enterprise LTSC edition if you have a country of the European Union selected as your region. Since switching between LTSC and IoT LTSC editions takes a few seconds, simply by changing the serial number in Settings (the number itself take from Microsoft website), you can switch to Enterprise LTSC, set the European region, uninstall Edge and Edge WebView2, and after reboot switch back to IoT LTSC by changing the number.
Where to download Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSCpreferably Russian?
Microsoft does not currently provide LTSC versions of Windows 11 24H2, but they are available in the Internet archive (archive.org website) a lot of links appear under the tags 24H2 and LTSC, – you can add IoT to them, but this is not necessary, – the official image 26100.1.240331-1435.ge_release_CLIENT_ENTERPRISES_OEM_x64FRE_en-us.iso contains three editions Enterprise LTSC, IoT Enterprise LTSC and IoT Enterprise LTSC Subscription. We are interested in the second one. The Russian language is delivered from the application store. The store in LTSC versions is enabled by the command wsreset -i from the command line in administrator mode. You can integrate Russian into the image yourself, or find it on trackers. Official images with Russian will be in the fall, when version 24H2 goes on sale.
That's all for now, good luck to you, like, ask questions, I'll answer.
