He's just answering a question from another member... Try to read fisrt, because until I know, He can use any system on his machine, until Kali Linux if he like, cos it's His Machine, He paid for her...
are you guys going to format your desktops? i have ltsc 2019 and formatting would just result in lot of days of headache and reinstalling stuff needed for both work or personally
Server 2022 LTSC - has a Windows 10 like UI and is based on a totally different code branch 20348.xxx Server vNext LTSC preview - has Windows 11 like UI but as it is a preview version and would expire in near future...probably should be avoided. I suggested Server 2022 LTSC , because until Windows 10 LTSC 2021 gets released, it is the newest version of Windows and closest you can get to have a bloat-free Windows experience. Thats all.
Formatting is probably the best thing you could do when you are about to install a brand new OS. However, I really hate all the work both before and after installation, tedious work that requires hours and hours of boring work. It used to be fun but I really drag myself to update more then I have to these days, especially if you got OCD on how things should be. Ain't fun at all.
I'd still be using LTSB 2016 "best ever" except I bought a GTX 1660 Super, and it will not work (no driver support), so had to move to LTSC 2019. I am hoping to use the next one, for 5+ years...but I imagine they will artificially break/obsolete that before then too. Then again, with current price of graphics cards...this 1660 Super will be my last! Oh you got that right! With each new version of Windows there is 4 more hours research on "how to", "where did it go" and 2 more hours of reg-tweaking and removing/disabling bloat, fixing bugs, restoring controls, restarting, repeating. I have it down to a specific, efficiently ordered procedure I can do blindfolded and it still takes me ~8+ hours to install Windows from bare metal to "ready to use". I am the "CDO" type (see what I did there?), and I DREAD new versions.
I don't really like doing reinstalls either, but to skip a lot of this tedious work of reinstalling everything you need to use I use one of my own AppsAutoInstall.cmd it installs an App sometimes and after installing it opens the app to make customizations, when necessary, and after closing the app it starts installing the next one, I do the same with the customizations of the system settings, but even so it's at least half a day or 8 hours lost in the complete process, and as everyone already knows that MSFT there's always something new, and most of the time it's inconvenient to solve it can take up to 10 hours of work...
A combination of using portable programs when possible + backing up some of my appdata folders makes reformatting windows pretty easy. I'm usually up and running like normal within 2 hours.
Always reinstall. For me while it is annoying to reinstall everything it's not to bad because most of my stuff is installed on other drives so it usually repairs it's self. The stuff that I have installed on the C drive is quick and easy to install. If given the chance I'll run it in a VM and test what I can then if I'm happy enough I'll upgrade to test it first and make sure it works with all my games, programs etc. then reinstall.
I always use autoinstall.cmd with my $OEM$ pack & it installs all needed apps with preconfigured settings . some settings are via registry, some via json , some via %alluserprofile% , some via %appdata% etc etc. Never done such 8-10 hrs of work just to reinstall os completly . for me its just an hour work & there it goes to start using os without any extra configs.