You can solve this problem with branding. Have a "Windows OS Bleeding Edge" brand that changes regularly. Have "Windows OS LTS" brand that changes less often.

They have tried exactly that with Windows 10 LTSC. And killed it off quite qucikly.

It was gimped from the start, LTSB/LTSC was never available to the general public

>And killed it off quite qucikly.

Evidently not, considering there were 4 such releases. The earliest was on July 29, 2015, and the latest was on November 16, 2021 and will be supported until January 13, 2032.

It hasn't been killed off. Microsoft has confirmed publicly that Windows 11 will have an LTSC release.

Curious what they will do about Microsoft Store apps in such a release. It's becoming more of a pressing concern. Maybe Windows 11 LTSC will have a "filtered flathub" situation similar to Red Hat / Fedora?

> [..] Windows 10 LTSC. And killed it off quite qucikly

They really didn't.

Full disclosure: I installed Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 on a brand new laptop earlier today :)

For this specific device, my wish is a Windows-compatible OS that's going to shut up and stay out of the way, and it seems the LTSC variant of Win10 is the closest Microsoft are willing to provide at the moment.

That LTSC doesn't come with Edge, Cortana or the Windows Store, well that's just the icing on the cake.

Or just have two Desktop Environments. One for the hoi polloi where the designers can go wild and the bean counters can push MSN "news", and one for Enterprise/Professionals that is more or less "Classic".

Like the good old times with Windows ME and 2000!

NT4 and 2000. Please leave Windows ME behind closed doors, thank you.

No NT4 is of the same lineage as 2000. I was referring to the other lineage of Windows with ME being the last one. The unification that XP provided was good for stability, but the eventual result is this whole Windows 11 ordeal.

I meant the UI; NT4 and 2000 were the nice and clean ones, for enterprise and professionals; ME had already first signs of the cartoon world, that XP continued on.

Looking back at the comment, yes, you are right. Both lines could share under the hood stuff, the NT/2000 line with clean UI and the ME line the colorized cartoon one. Or, they could split the line with Home and Pro, both of them they still have.

Only very rich corporations like FOSS community can simultaneously support two DEs (especially when one of them never changes too much). Microsoft has neither budget nor enough staff for that.

Sarcasm noted, however when looking at WinUI 3.0/WinAppSDK/... progress, one really wonders who's left.

> Enterprise/Professionals that is more or less "Classic".

Yes - I’ve been wondering since win10 why Microsoft thinks the enterprise edition needs an xbox app preinstalled.

The problem with Microsoft always looking to their competition for ideas is the fail to capitalize on their own strengths. They end up chasing Mac OS or Android and create a product that isn't as good as either of those (because chasing the competition is hard) while subsequently throwing away what made their own product competitive and interesting.

Windows should not be a Mac OS clone. But every single UI update sends it in that direction.

Windows should clone one particular release of OS X: Snow Leopard.

It was marketed as a "Zero New Features" update [0]. Only performance, reliability and back-end upgrades (and it was a packed release for sure that completed the 64 bit transition).

EDIT: Anyone who agrees, upvote this comment! Who knows maybe someone in Redmond will see it! You never know!

[0] https://9to5mac.com/2022/02/26/apple-work-looking-back-at-wh...

The most popular versions of Windows -- 7 and 10 -- are both pretty low-feature releases. Windows 7 was just the completed version of Vista. Windows 10 was a bit of rollback of some of the worst UI ideas in 8. Neither were radical departures from the version before.

> fail to capitalize on their own strengths

Well, they capitalized on their market share immencely with Azure. At the beginning it was pretty ****, but a lot of customers signed up immediately. Not because that **** is better, but because Microsoft already held all their eggs.

Microsoft is securing their position with Azure. It definitely keeps getting better in ways that work well for their customers.

Windows is the linchpin in that strategy so I don't understand why they've moved organizationally moved it so far away. It's relegated to being Bing adjacent.

And how ubiquitous is MacOS compared to Windows? It isn't even close

Over the past decade, the U.S. MacOS market share has doubled from 15% to 30%, whereas Windows has dropped from 80% to 60% (according to statcounter)

I don't know where you got your numbers from but they don't appear to be correct. According to this, MacOS is around 16% while Windows is somewhere around 70%

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

Yeah, the worldwide data seems more relevant. Still, if you look at it, apparently Windows has lost more than 5 percentage points just in the last three months. It seems to be a historical low. I don't know what triggered this, but at least in the US, Windows seems to be on its way out. Though it could have also to do with Apple's very efficient M CPUs, which aren't available for Windows, not just with MacOS itself.

It's the year of the Linux desktop?

The problem with pleasing new costumers is that you might fail to gain old customers.

In case MS marketing reads this thread: you can simply fix the outstanding, sore-thumb problems with your product in its own way and gain both types of customers. Instead of poorly mimicking something they never wanted in the first place.