W10 Edu vs W10 Ent LTSC

[DrCheese]

Aye - I'm not disagreeing with you remember, I think we should be doing the above. My desire to get the Office improvements out to users like... now is a big reason why I'm changing over. I find them hugely beneficial for the stuff I do, so I want my users to have it.

 

I stuck with the LTSB at the start tho because a lot of the issues weren't ironed out at the time, but I wanted to move users up to Windows 10. It was a nice half way house at the time

[Koldov]

It's not one specific feature, it's the idea. Our job is to provide the technology and iron out the problems.

 

1. We should provide the latest versions of things for students because otherwise they'll be even further behind when they leave school. Don't force people to use IE etc.

2. At home everyone will have the latest features, because that's how Windows works, so they'll be confused when stuff they know how to use is missing

 

Feature updates can be scheduled for overnight.

 

That's a very forward thinking philosophy and I applaud you for it.

 

However, I'm not sure if that's what I feel my job is... I don't 'provide' them with the technology, I assist with the technology the school asks for and I keep reasonably up to date with OS changes purely for security reasons.

 

1. I don't feel that students will lack anything because they are not using a modern app calculator or paint 3D. IE is a browser and how they get to Google doesn't really matter (99% of the resources they use are web-based anyway).

2. Home and School or Home and Work they are different environments and should be treated as such imho. As long as they can find their home folder, the browser shortcut and the Office icons, the version of the OS that gets them there is irrelevant.

[mavhc]

However, I'm not sure if that's what I feel my job is... I don't 'provide' them with the technology, I assist with the technology the school asks for and I keep reasonably up to date with OS changes purely for security reasons.

 

1. I don't feel that students will lack anything because they are not using a modern app calculator or paint 3D. IE is a browser and how they get to Google doesn't really matter (99% of the resources they use are web-based anyway).

2. Home and School or Home and Work they are different environments and should be treated as such imho. As long as they can find their home folder, the browser shortcut and the Office icons, the version of the OS that gets them there is irrelevant.

 

I'm much more in the recommend rather than provide what's asked for camp. Otherwise they'd ask for a faster horse and buggy, or a spaceship.

 

IE is a terrible browser that doesn't support modern websites, or work fast. Should be providing the best browsers.

 

It's not an office though, it's a school, much creative work to be done. Photos are fundamental to modern life, therefore better tools to use photos are good. Paint 3d has excellent graphics editing tools that are simple enough for kids. And they can use the same thing at home.

 

There's no difference between learning to read at school and reading at home or work. The only reason we learn stuff in school is to use it out of school after all.

[Koldov]

I'm much more in the recommend rather than provide what's asked for camp. Otherwise they'd ask for a faster horse and buggy, or a spaceship.

 

IE is a terrible browser that doesn't support modern websites, or work fast. Should be providing the best browsers.

 

It's not an office though, it's a school, much creative work to be done. Photos are fundamental to modern life, therefore better tools to use photos are good. Paint 3d has excellent graphics editing tools that are simple enough for kids. And they can use the same thing at home.

 

There's no difference between learning to read at school and reading at home or work. The only reason we learn stuff in school is to use it out of school after all.

 

Yes, of course I recommend which laptop to get, I recommend which projector, which broadband, filter, and I will voice my concerns about other IT purchases. But if they decide to buy X, Y or Z, I can't do any more than that (we wouldn't have iPads if that were the case). I certainly don't help them decide how to provide IT in the curriculum. Once they have planned it though I will try to make that happen. I'm here to advise (when asked) and to try and enable, it's above my pay-grade to lead.

 

Funnily enough they have a website or two that due to me not having enabled something or other on Chrome, IE works best and it isn't slow for us.

 

I'm not sure I agree photos are fundamental to modern life... Unless that instagram/facebook filter is going to get them somewhere in life - and they do plenty of that at home I'm sure

 

I guess it depends on the school age level and the planning of the lesson, we don't have many lessons on ICT and what we do I have never seen anyone using paint for anything.

 

There's a difference to learning to read at school, at school it is structured and planned.

Edited March 22, 2019 by Koldov

[5nowman]

I remember seeing a windows group policy to say "do not install an os upgrade as a part of windows updates"

or words to that affect. In this case could we not strip down windows 10 pro and apply this policy?

 

Also there's so many versions of windows 10 now I have lost count.

 

Are you all using windows 10 enterprise 2019 ltsc ? I don't see any windows 10 enterprise 2019 ltsb

Edited May 20, 2019 by 5nowman

[kennysarmy]

I remember seeing a windows group policy to say "do not install an os upgrade as a part of windows updates"

or words to that affect. In this case could we not strip down windows 10 pro and apply this policy?

 

Also there's so many versions of windows 10 now I have lost count.

 

Are you all using windows 10 enterprise 2019 ltsc ? I don't see any windows 10 enterprise 2019 ltsb

 

2016 LTSB here across the site.

No issues for several years.

Just too busy to even think about an OS upgrade until the summer and then I've a big decision to make I guess - stick with LTSB which has been stable (and not one person has complained about it being different to home! - or jump in to Edu and go very softly softly as we iron out all the idiosyncrasies )

[CHiLL]

We're using Windows 10 Education and have been since about 2017. Haven't had any issues with it in that time. As I use SCCM to manage Windows Updates, it doesn't push any feature updates automatically. So I'll just download the ISO from VLSC, import it to SCCM and start testing it. Once I'm happy with it, I'll roll that out to a live testing collection of say, 5 machines in each IT suite and some teacher workstations (that the staff have agreed to). Once that's done, it can be rolled out across the site.

[mavhc]

Can use WSUS to control the feature update rollout of Pro, don't even need to dl the 500GBs of files either.

[supportman]

2016 LTSB here across the site.

No issues for several years.

Just too busy to even think about an OS upgrade until the summer and then I've a big decision to make I guess - stick with LTSB which has been stable (and not one person has complained about it being different to home! - or jump in to Edu and go very softly softly as we iron out all the idiosyncrasies )

 

Having just done this exact migration recently, its been an absolute nightmare compared to LTSB! The start menu has taken me days to work out and the 1st time logins are twice as long now. I ended up needing to apply a local startmenu.xml policy that kept breaking from the smallest errors. Disabling Microsoft store doesn't seem to work reliably using Group Policy. Sometimes it blocks it, other times not(I just had a student tell me he managed to install 'world of tanks' but now it says disabled so we cant uninstall it. Then don't get me started about the bloatware icons that education version keeps creating on each new local user profile.

 

Add to that, me not knowing if the soon upcoming 1903 update is going to re-install all the bloatware or break anything else...

 

Wish i'd stuck with LTSB/C to be honest!! Its been problem free since we installed it. We are using Office 2019 so no issue with future Office 365 upgrades. The only thing that worried me and visual studio going forward for our computer scientists. Someone mentioned it might not work in the future hence our move.

Edited May 21, 2019 by supportman

[mavhc]

I use Pro, uninstall apps from wim file, few registry edits to disable suggestions, block the store executable file from running. Having a start menu with a few extra icons on hasn't confused anyone. Every 6 months we get new features and maybe 1 bug to solve. Most importantly it's free.

[DrCheese]

Disabling Microsoft store doesn't seem to work reliably using Group Policy.

 

Admit that bit is dumb, you can open it, quickly browse to an app and click install... Then it comes up saying the store is disabled but the app icon then appears as "Pending". If you aren't quick enough it'll say disabled but it's stupid it loads in the first place!

 

I'm just going to block it via applocker instead

Edited May 21, 2019 by DrCheese

[k-strider]

We currently use LTSC after moving away from Education.... when we are forced back to Edu by o365 or Visual Studio then we will cross that bridge when we come to it.... i like LTSC

[lafleur1977]

Edu here with any unrequired apps removed as part of the MDT Build Sequence.

 

How did you remove the apps in the MDT task sequence? I am looking into how to do that currently but not sure whats the best way.

[Rob_D]

How did you remove the apps in the MDT task sequence? I am looking into how to do that currently but not sure whats the best way.

We have an application that calls the decrapifier power-shell script if we want to cut out the preinstalled junk.

creating an app with the prerequisite uninstall command is by far the essayist way I've found.

[Arthur]

I am looking into how to do that currently but not sure what's the best way.

The following instructions may help? This method removes the apps during the WinPE phase in SCCM or MDT so you have less issues.

 

www.moderndeployment.com/removing-windows-10-built-in-apps-offline-winpe-quick-guide

 

Windows 10 built-in apps are typically removed in many corporate environments and can be difficult to remove as part of an SCCM or MDT OS deployment task sequence. This blog post “Removing Windows 10 Built-in Apps Offline WinPE Quick Guide” will provide the step-by-step instructions on how to successfully remove the Windows 10 Built-in apps during the WinPE phase (OFFLINE) of an SCCM or MDT deployment task sequence. The good news is Microsoft has a working PowerShell script created by Michael Niehaus that was published a few years ago but still works beautifully. In addition, the Microsoft provided script properly logs the removal results to the standard C:\Windows\CCM\Logs folder Post-OS deployment.

 

Advantages

Michael Niehaus provided some great reasons for using the OFFLINE WinPE approach vs other methods. In my opinion, these are the top reasons:

 

• Avoid intermittent failure when the RemoveApps scripts run after the task sequence boot into Windows the first time. I’ve seen the Remove Apps ONLINE process fail at certain points of the removal process and hang the SCCM task sequence deployment – Not good.
  
• Avoid issues with the Windows Update agent attempting to update apps while the remove script is trying to remove them.
  
• I’ve tested OSDBuilder using the -RemoveAppx PowerShell parameter, but during my testing, with VLSC (Volume license media) the OSDBuilder script would say it’s removed but the apps would appear after SCCM deployment. I didn’t have time to troubleshoot why but it did work with MDSN Win10 media – Strange.
  

[lafleur1977]

The following instructions may help? This method removes the apps during the WinPE phase in SCCM or MDT so you have less issues.

 

www.moderndeployment.com/removing-windows-10-built-in-apps-offline-winpe-quick-guide

 

Thanks for that, it looks great but its confused me a bit running through the steps as it's referring to SCCM alot. I've downloaded the ps script and xml. It then says to "create a new SCCM OSD package with these 2 files in the network source share location and distribute the new SCCM OSD legacy package to your DP’s". Have i missed something?

 

Thanks

[Arthur]

I've downloaded the ps script and xml.

MDT is a lot easier than SCCM.

 

Basically all you would need to do is copy the PowerShell script and XML to a folder within your MDT scripts folder (e.g. X:\DeploymentShare\Scripts\Remove Windows 10 Apps) and then create a new application that runs the PowerShell script from there. Once that is done, add the application to the appropriate place in your task sequence.

 

The quiet install command would be:

 

Powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -File "%SCRIPTROOT%\Remove Windows 10 Apps\RemoveApps.ps1" 

Edited June 5, 2019 by Arthur

[Rob_D]

MDT is a lot easier than SCCM.

Basically all you would need to do is copy the PowerShell script and XML to a folder within your MDT scripts folder (e.g. X:\DeploymentShare\Scripts\Remove Windows 10 Apps) and then create a new application that runs the PowerShell script from there. Once that is done, add the application to the appropriate place in your task sequence.

 

Why not just let the add an application wizard copy the powershell scrip into the applications folder like another install script? Is there an advantage to putting it in the scripts folder?

[Arthur]

Is there an advantage to putting it in the scripts folder?

Not really.

 

@lafleur1977. I would try @Rob_D's suggestion first. It's a bit neater.

[lafleur1977]

Not really.

 

@lafleur1977. I would try @Rob_D's suggestion first. It's a bit neater.

 

Thanks for your help with this last week. I've been looking at it since and managed to add the remove script into MDT and it removes most of the apps. I tried a few different scripts that work slightly different but I'm struggling mainly to remove the 'people' app - that horrible icon the appears on the taskbar next to notifcations/clock etc. I tried adding 'Microsoft.People' and 'Microsoft.Windows.PeopleExperienceHost' to my xml file but neither remove the app. Have you managed to remove this or can it be managed with grou policy?

 

Thanks

[cscc]

Windows10Debloater is great if you want to stay with non LTSC/LTSB versions, can be run post install or as part of an MDT task sequence using appropriate switches. I've tested on 1903 and experienced no issues.

 

https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater

[free780]

Well that's one way of getting people off LTSC.

 

https://borncity.com/win/2019/06/15/crazy-windows-10-enterprise-ltsc-2019-offered-a-feature-update-to-1903/