MicrosoftReading many of the replies made me want to chime in and agree on some points.
So personally and in small business, I'm on the bleeding edge - Fast insider. I'm in IT and know how to fix issue or roll back or revert, but I can't risk new stuff and changes to masses of users in business. If there are a small number of PCs or small environment, upgrading is easy.
However, working on deploying to an enterprise which involves many users and configurations and hardware/software combinations, custom software and tweaks, etc, is a pain to upgrade. Sure we could do it, but it introduces lots of (undiscovered) issues, support tickets, down time, loss of business and productivity.
We have a few thousand new PCs to deploy with a 5 year service life for specialized use in business front end locations and I WISH we had the budget to have LTSC. I would put 1809 on them and get them stable and probably not have to touch of change them besides the supported security patches for 5 years. Of course I would be putting in the work to upgrade all those 1809 systems to 23H2 in 2024, but I would not be rushed and have more time to test and deploy a working system.
What's worse is Microsoft says an 1809 LTSC build is supported for 10 years, but the same bits for the Pro license is only supported for a 18 months. Of course the same bits on Enterprise gets 30 months... Couldn't they just make it 3 years even at 36 months and allow this to Pro SKUs?
So then for stability, I want to choose 1909 but fear doing so because next year when 21H2 comes out, we would be rolling out 20H2 (as we deploy a year behind to allow Microsoft to stabilize whatever features they added). Of course this would be one of those major upgrade paths that could break stuff. Basically now I have to do an upgrade every year (instead of every 3 to 5 years) to use the Pro license. This doesn't feel very Pro to me.
Sort of miss Windows 7 and Service Packs.
I hate this forced shorter support cycle and it seems other IT Admins/Implementers are in the same boat. Microsoft hasn't made Windows a subscription but it feels like they have found a way for businesses to pay more (to get the enterprise license or LTSC) if you want access to our updates/support longer.
Right now Microsoft can get away with this because we don't have much of an option. If there was, I'm sure many businesses would jump ship.
