I cobbled together a post last year on acquiring it:

https://tinyapps.org/blog/201811300700_windows_10_ltsc.html

However, it does require a willingness to enter into a VL agreement with Microsoft.

According to people who have purchased from there, they're VL keys that can be used many times (e.g. 2500 times), so they just sell the same key over and over to multiple people:

> ...sellers on eBay are probably people that work for companies that get GVLK and MAK Product Keys from MSDN/Microsoft and then just sell 'em off because the companies they work for more than likely would never even notice? I mean, with MAK Product Keys having from 2500 to 5000 activations per key, at least if they still work the same way they did in Vista/7 days, most companies that pay for volume licensing never ever actually use anywhere near that many. [0]

> after about 3 hours I got a mail with a key and a link to download "LTSCX64.2019.ENU.JAN2019.iso" from googledrive. I did not download the ISO, so I cannot comment on that, but I typed the key into VAMT and its description is "Win 10 RTM EnterpriseS Volume:MAK" and the key had 50 activations left. I tried it on one of my LTSC 2019 installations and it worked fine. I assume that the remaining activation count will decrease over time, even when I do not use the key on my other installations, as I suspect that the seller sells the same key to more than one buyer.. [0]

> so, after about a week all 50 activations of the key I got are gone. since I only used 8 activations, one can be sure that the key was sold to multiple buyers. business as usual on ebay.. [0]

It's probably against some contract somewhere, but IANAL.

[0] https://forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/windows-10-enterpri...

They are also participating in a commercial piracy endeavor that the company who was issued the key AND Microsoft have an interest in shutting down. Ms because such endeavors attract customers who could otherwise trivially be converted into buyers. Companies because they could get audited and fined.

This is as illegal and higher risk than torrent sites.

Even if you can resell a key as part of selling a copy of windows you paid for you can't sell your employers property, can't sell part of a contract, can't sell more than you actually paid for.

If the company purchased the right to have n machines at their company run windows and each key can be activated n * x times nobody sold you the right to sell n * x copies of windows to everyone on the internet.

Like it or not those agreements aren't sales and the keys aren't a physical item you have purchased they are just a technical measure to constrain users from sharing a single ISO file to their million closest friends.

Erm, no - that's not how Microsoft's volume licensing works. Volume keys are issued to enterprises that buy them, and only that organisation is licensed to use them.

Unscrupulous employees have been known to sell the keys.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/p/windows-10-pro-for-worksta...

That's just fixing the symptoms rather than the cause.

The real solution is for Microsoft to treat its customers with a bit more respect.

This company (like most other companies) operates out of greed, and that doesn't go well with respect. They're just trying to milk as much as they can from you.

Once you're a huge corporation with tons of stakeholders, it seems inevitable that you will compromise customers in favor of profits sooner or later.

But if you follow the logical path from capitalism, it is most definitely inevitable. There is no way to maximize profits without hurting the users.

If one company does the right thing, another will take it's place because it will generate more profit.

Can you imagine a CEO constantly telling it's shareholders that they will not increase profits because they want to "treat customers more fairly"? He'd be sacked in the first opportunity.

Microsoft has embraced the modern development model and its culture as well. In other words, customers are cattle.

WoW classic also works perfectly, if that's your thing.

I can tolerate some bloatware (like games), but what about the telemetry? Are you OK with that or did you find a way to disable all telemetry?

Instructions on how to activate your installation of LTSC here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19420337

If you want to skip straight to the piracy, here's an open source package for you, complete with keys, hosted ironically on Microsoft servers, that uses vlmcsd: https://github.com/ekistece/vlmcsd-autokms

It's a pretty clever hack. It runs the KMS emulator locally and fakes the network connection with a TAP device from OpenVPN. Works perfectly.

I tried using wine or even using Steam directly on Linux, but playing any game with 30-40% less performance is ridiculous.

If you really like games, Linux is unusable for anything big.

I've had to dual boot Windows for the last 10 years just to play a game without stuttering, lag, huge FPS drops, etc.

Nothing would make me happier than being able to only use Linux, but until the community takes gaming seriously, people are forced to use Windows.

Personally, I don't have that kind of problem, and I suspect I'm not alone. Of the games I play that don't have Linux ports, they run well enough under wine, even on my (recent) laptop with Intel graphics. But I'm a pretty casual gamer, and honestly find it rare that I just must play the type of games that require a high-end Windows rig.

I'd argue if it was the issue, even Windows wouldn't let me play any of these games with reasonable performance.

When playing CS:GO (a relatively old game) I have stuttering, drastic FPS drops and more :(

It's a shame, because it literally can't be anything but the software. It's the same hardware with different OSes. Might even be windows specific optimizations on the games part, but in the end it doesn't matter.

The bottom line unfortunately is: it's significantly worse.

The complexity of setting this up would be a good point to address. Linux Mint for example has a tool to do this for you. This is logically a workaround for nvidia actually contributing an open source driver that doesn't suck.

There is a supposedly much better supported open source driver for new AMD hardware as well. Another thing the community is doing.

If the problem is with the closed source driver there isn't much the community can do. It's very hard to reverse engineer a complex device like a gpu. If the problem isn't games in general but that particular game there again isn't much the community can do.

In a word: no. KMSpico is kind of perfect. The process happens entirely locally, and is quite technically "clean".

Nobody would call that theft.