I have a secondary laptop, the hardware of which can be seen in my signature. But basically it has a 2-core/4-thread Core i5-5200U CPU, 8GB of DDR3L RAM and a 1TB Western Digital HDD. Was probably built in late 2014 as its first driver releases are dated July 28, 2015, one day before Win10 v1507 shipped. It is currently running the full Windows 10 Enterprise v22H2, needless to say that, because of the old rotating HDD, latest Windows runs rather sluggishly on it. So I want to stick Enterprise LTSC on it. Which one should I put in? LTSB 2015, 2016, or LTSC 2019 or 2021? Don't want to lose compatibility with recent software. I do plan on adding a 240GB SSD to it in the future.
When this is added all windows SKU's andor builds will work fine on it, for now. Depending on your needs you can select the desired LTSx.
The hdd will be some sort of bottleneck on all LTSx, i run all builds (including 259xx) on my old first gen i3 with 6GB RAM but all have ssd's. Why don't you just install some and try how they run?
That one ran fine on a test on an ancient Core2Quad Q8200 i was playing with, of course using a €15.75 cheap 256GB ssd.
My 2 main concerns here are app compatibility and driver compatibility. As many Windows 10 drivers now seem to require a fairly recent version of the OS.
All my hardware runs fine on WU provided drivers and on the Q8200 i needed to run a win 8 driver to get the lan working.
Turns out the best version is LTSB 2015. It runs very smoothly. As smoothly as full Windows 8.1 on the same hardware. And it's still supported for 2 years. And I got to the conclusion that Windows 8/10/11+ without the Modern Apps is basically just a modernized-looking Windows Vista/7.
Oh, I see, you're willing to accuse me of making "wild claims" without supporting that accusation, but expect me to make the effort you're unwilling to? Good luck with that approach...