They can never “close the loopholes” entirely, because there are customers that want machines with zero access to public Internet (embedded systems, national security, etc), where a Microsoft account is an absolute non-starter. Closing all the loopholes would be abandoning those market segments (many of which are already trending towards Linux/etc anyway)

I suppose they might make it mandatory unless you have some special version of Windows which is hard to buy (like LTSC). But make it too hard they risk that market. Anyway, now bypassing it involves opening a command prompt window, only the more technical users will do so, and that’s a small enough minority they probably aren’t missing much.

> Closing all the loopholes would be abandoning those market segments (many of which are already trending towards Linux/etc anyway)

Sounds more likely to me that they'll just abandon those market segments.

They actually already make a special version of windows for those purposes and it isn't available to the open market. Government editions that have no telemetry, advertising, or integrated cloud products at all.

I know it is a pipe dream but I wish they could be forced to sell this to the general public.

Are you talking about LTSC or something else?

I have looked into buying LTSC. Apparently you need a business (I own a “shelf” company which has never done anything, but legally it counts), and a Microsoft volume license agreement. I looked into the later. Supposedly there is this trick where you order all these useless-but-cheap Identity Manager CALs to cheaply meet the minimum order requirement for a volume license. But I got a bit stuck working out what to order (or even if it was still available through resellers in my country). I lost interest at that point.

I am not Meph504, but I suppose they meant either Windows Enterprise G or Windows Enterprise G N editions, not Windows LTSC editions.

Is Enterprise G the same thing as “China Government Edition”?

Is there a “US Government Edition”? Is it different from the Chinese one?

How does G differ from LTSC?

Yes it is different, and the difference between gov edition and ltsc is that. The gov edition isn't designed for long term support without change, but to increase security of windows and remove all the telemry and forced integrated services from Microsoft.

This info is publicly available so more detailed info should be easy to find.

All the sources I can find say that Enterprise G is China-only. The US Government (among others) doesn’t use it, even for classified stuff.

Telemetry is a bit of a non-issue for many national security applications-they run on special air-gapped networks with zero direct access to the public Internet, Windows can try to phone home to Microsoft all day long, it’ll never get through.

Correct