Greetings, I am a long time user of LTSB/LTSC versions of Windows. I have never used an IOT version, and was interested in trying one out recently due to its 5-year longer support. I have read that the IOT LTSC version is a "binary equivalent" of it's non-IOT LTSC version. I installed the two versions below in VirtualBox with the exact same specs... and I noticed the IOT version had a 8-9 GB install size... where the non-IOT version had a 16-17 GB install size. I have looked... but cannot find an explanation. If they are close to "binary equivalents"... where the differences should be just licensing requirements code... why does the IOT version have about 1/2 the install size? These were fresh installs with no updates applied. NIC was disabled during install and remained disabled after. *en-us_windows_10_enterprise_ltsc_2021_x64_dvd_d289cf96.iso c90a6df8997bf49e56b9673982f3e80745058723a707aef8f22998ae6479597d *en-us_windows_10_iot_enterprise_ltsc_2021_x64_dvd_257ad90f.iso a0334f31ea7a3e6932b9ad7206608248f0bd40698bfb8fc65f14fc5e4976c160 Thanks!
To my knowledge, LTSC does ship with licensing policy "ShippedWithReserves" set to 1, while the IoT LTSC does have it set to 0. "ShippedWithReserves" reserves ca. 7GB of disk space for Windows Update, so, even with a nearly full disk, WU still works. IoT is targeted to smaller embedded systems, with less space, so, it is disabled here.
Thanks! Interesting... I noticed that the VM hard drive files for both were actually around 8 GB each... which I forgot to mention in my post. I wonder if the reserved space is just empty space on the disk and that is why the non-IOT hard drive file didn't get bigger.
Thanks again. What also I found interesting... and falls slightly out of the scope of this post... is that when I installed both... IOT instantly prompts me to think about using Edge in a pop-up above the clock when I boot it up the first time after install. Non-IOT does not do this. This goes back to the thing I read about these two versions being "binary equivalents"... seeing different behavior makes me think that is not so much the case.
Different product and licensing policies. The bits are the same, but different policies are applies to each SKU. What's promoted in one might be suppressed in the other. The same for normal Pro, ProEducation, ProWorkstation, Enterprise, Education SKUs. You can switch via product key between them and it will apply different policies and rules, accordingly.