this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
40 points (97.6% liked)
Linux
62749 readers
161 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That sounds like an interesting fallback and better than Windows 11. Do you need a new licence for that or can you just change from Windows 10 Pro to IOT LTSC?
Someone already said massgrave, and they’re right, but I wanna be 100% clear: Microsoft can’t take these away. If they did then smart fridges would be complaining about how they’re not registered, massive enterprises would have to completely change how they provision systems, pc manufacturers would have to change their processes and even if it was as simple as a change to the generic disk image they ship (it’s not) they’d have to handle all the systems out there in the world.
And
Even if Microsoft went ahead anyway and removed the ability to use some method (like they did with kms38, which had nothing to do with mas and everything to do with addressing the end of the Unix epoch) there are methods they cant effectively remove like hwid.
Anyway, go to the massgrave page about 21h2 iot ltsc and read up.
massgrave.dev
Thanks, but this seems to be rather an unofficial hack, no? If Microsoft decides to block this approach, the setup may cause trouble out of a sudden which I'd like to avoid as my relatives live quite far away.
well yeah, it surely is. win10 iot ltsc itself is defo getting support till 2032, but massgrave's hwid/tsforge may get blocked at some point, though most people highly doubt that since m$ doesn't really care at this point. (heck, the massgrave repos are hosted on m$ owned github) in addition to that, massgrave's hwid mode generates an hwid on microsoft's servers just like genuine windows licenses, so i'm pretty sure it'll remain working, even if the method to generate hwid gets blocked somehow..
i do believe switching to a gnu/linux distro is a much better choice, but this is also an option if your relatives really prefer using windows or need to.