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.
Is there a “US Government Edition”? Is it different from the Chinese one?
How does G differ from LTSC?
This info is publicly available so more detailed info should be easy to find.
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.
I know it is a pipe dream but I wish they could be forced to sell this to the general public.