Win 11 Enterprise IoT LTSC new build is on the net ..

It's very clean -- almost too clean

No updates available yet on WU in the VM, except MSRT and Defender updates. I comes with latest Edge & Webview2, which is weird, and seems to have classic Notepad (I guess the latter makes sense if they indeed are stripping out all modern app stuff). Small .wim file -- it'll be smaller once I'm through with it

I captured it after sysprep, so far everything up to that point working alright. The Start Menu is STRIPPED. I installed it in VM with internet connection, no app updating or anything.

 

I was going to just clean the install.wim a bit before final compression, and may make one with Edge/Webview2 and one without. Hard to stomach that 1.94gb folder for a browser (well, and webview tech). I really do hope they keep it this simple and small (even with Edge it is smaller than usual) and that the modern app situation stays this way. I don't know, this comes across to me as a tweaked/personalized build rather than a direct MS snapshot, but I could be wrong. MS is not usually this efficient, nor do they normally have it tweaked to have this many annoyances disabled by default. I did read some people put it through virus scanners and it appears clean.

They should put in a toggle in Personalization somewhere, to have the default start menu open to (All) Programs; it's so retarted to have to click on that every time. They also need to disable showing "Recommended" if the regtweak to disable its listed content is utilized. I don't use the default start menu normally, but haven't tested if any of the alternatives work on this (or going forward). Even on earlier Windows it wouldn't open to all programs, you'd have to use ClassicShell and give it a long pause on the revert, so that Programs would stay open as the main view in the start menu.

EDIT: I do wonder, since the WebP and other extensions are absent from the Program Files\WindowsApps folder, if there is any support for certain media formats. On lite builds I had to figure out to keep certain ones, but they are absent in this image. I'll have to check that later on resulting install(s) to see if those need adding in there from another source iso.

 

Thanks for the share.

I can't believe how bad the Windows 11 Start menu is, but I also can't endorse using StartIsBack or Explorer Patcher as these also break after MS updates... I am sick of MS ruling the OS in ways nobody agrees with, but that said I guess I could use a launcher instead of the start menu as I know the names of everything, I am always just so conflicted as I want to make things for the masses and things they'd like, but ever since the upgrade process to windows keeps breaking and failing any mods I put in place, it's just stupid, that is why I am so excited to see photoshop making it's way to Linux, I could easily use KDE every day myself, but as I've not yet found a distro that works on Laptops and Desktops, nVidia/AMD/Intel Graphics and doesn't also fail on updates, I am stuck in a limbo, forced to use a different OS to what I offer the public and it sucks.

There was NOTHING wrong with Control panel, it works, can easily add to it and it was sorted, all they needed to do was add a search box up the top right to find things quicker, these drop down layout crap with 3 options is CRAP, why have a 27" screen that can only show 3 options, or a start menu with 12 items on it??? it's mental, MS really should have made 2 separate interfaces as they keep flip flopping about allowing touch controls (big spacing) and a few things offer compact mode (like explorer), but by not being consistent it's actually worse and people seem to be more worried about having control panel and Settings on the same OS (why? it's called options/choice) I'd never go into the Settings app at all if I had the choice, it has no benefits at all.

 

It's all true, sadly. It's one thing to try to simplify the UI and gear it toward the most-used settings (and learning from individual user usage, like they tried to do in some areas of the OS) -- but it's another thing to then completely fail at all that and making the replacements slower to load and harder to access in every imaginable way, to then end up alienating even the people who would have found it challenging to use the legacy utils (CPL, etc.). I think this is what should be called dumb-scaling, but since it's designed dumb as well, it just ends up being dumb-dumb.

EDIT: It appears NTLite is not playing well with this image yet as removing Edge and Webview only shrank the .wim by 240mb even though the Edge folder in PF(x86) went from 1.94gb to 10mb in the image... So it ended up being 3.44gb or so. However, using my Lite preset on another run of it had the usual outcome in size, 1.89gb for wim (1.22gb for esd). We shall see how things progress, I guess.

 

Dropped in Last11 Pro image structure, changed autounattend.xml key(s) to: KBN8V-HFGQ4-MGXVD-347P6-PDQGT (same as Win10 21h1 IoT Enterprise LTSC).

Everything works fine, except StartAllBack during its install gave me "not intended for this version of Windows" message, but once I clicked Enable regardless, it works fine. Above is a screenshot of the install based on the Lite image I made, even there everything is fine.

Activated with the abbodi script in $Scripts as usual. The only thing I noticed is that the Settings app is not displaying the exit button (it works if you just click in right corner), but there are bound to be some issues with early builds.

Task Manager icon has changed, looks better on the desktop context menu. Has the "Ultimate Performance" power savings option (sticks when set in sysprep VM).

 

Some of my Clean up scripts get stuck trying to take ownership of files, so Ghost is right, you need to be careful what MS has locked down as the only way I got it to continue was to use Task Manager to end task takeownership.exe

But that said I've just completed my build and making the ESD now to VM test before I get the hell off this Win 10 IOT - which has given me nothing but troubles since - if it weren't for the ability to drag and drop on the address bar or from it to make a shortcut, I'd not miss it at all

I don't care if it will get updates until after 2030, I wouldn't want to keep using it that long anyway.

-EDIT-

VM tests gone good, I even have a settings close button.

I did remove Edge and Widgets - which in turn disables CoPilot but pretty sure they'd go on again from Store. On that note, Store for LTSC still works fine in this release (if you need it).

 

I've just noticed on my real PC install that my File, Edit, View etc menu in Explorer fails to work. Not sure why yet, but I shouldn't miss it for a bit but apart from that it's going ok so far.

-EDIT-

A VM install and the file menu isn't shown and instead has the ribbon in place, meaning I have to kill a tweak in Last11 Tweaks else it'll break explorer

 

The issue with Explorer was StartAllBack being set to Win7 Command Bar, simply change it to Windows 11 or Windows 10 styles in the Explorer section and it's fixed, I'll have to update my StartAllBack and all will be well again Seeing as we're waiting for a version of it that doesn't complain able unsupported version of windows, it'll nearly fix itself

I like Windows 11 Command Bar more than the Win 10 Ribbon (even though it gives you more space in the window, I find they are useful shortcuts to tools.

 

I did just have my Real PC reset my desktop/download and paths to C:\Users\User\* instead of my D:\ I set using my Settings app.. so be aware there are some issues going on with this build, I just don't know what triggered it.

 

Well, this version's official release date is still six months away, so I guess that's to be expected, but thanks for the heads-up as to the specifics. It does seem that this version should be a worthy successor to the current Windows 10 Enterprise IoT LTSC. And thanks to the work by you, Trouba and Ghost, we'll be ready for it. Many Thanks to the three of you!