enterprise/ultimate or posready 7 for long term usage?

howdy,

i've felt particularly stubborn and restless lately so i'm trying to upgrade to win7 on this particular pc (i5 6600k + msi z170a m7 mobo) for the 500th time before it's too late. standard extended support ended almost a year ago, so i think i might be a little late to the party, but whatever. i used a stock 7 enterprise x64 iso, a win10 ltsc 1809 iso, along with the sticked mdl simplix tool to make an updated aio iso file. the .bat script threw up a couple dism errors but the iso seemingly turned out fine, rufus didn't have any issues creating a bootable drive and while i haven't installed it yet, for the first time ever with this pc, i finally have the windows 7 installer working and you have no idea how cathartic this feels.

however.. the simplix tool's readme explicitly says it only supports standard win7 skus, which micro$oft's esu program is covering up to january 2023. the slightly newer embedded skus are being supported for a little longer - embedded standard 7 is being begrudgingly kept alive until october 2023 and posready 7 support doesn't end until october 2024! o_o

unsurprisingly, i kind of care about getting those two extra years of updates since i intend on using 7 (and/or 8.1) until i can smoothly migrate over to [insert linux distro here], and i might even try using it on a newer pc with a ryzen in it.. that'll be fun. i have no interest in using windows 10. (ltsb/c is the only version i can tolerate and even that's getting worse.) the thing is, i don't know if posready 7 updates work on non-embedded win7 or if they'll be installable on enterprise x64 when the time comes. i saw one post from abbodi saying he couldn't get it working but that was a while ago, i'm not sure if things have changed, and i don't even know if i read their post properly. either way, i haven't seen the topic of posready 7 come up online much, so i don't really know what to think

tldr - if i want to use windows 7 for a few more years before i switch over to linux, do i have to install posready 7 to get support until october 2024, or will those updates work fine on regular win7 editions?

thanks!

 

i used W7_x64_AiO_New_2.3.cmd and i don't remember the exact error that dism spat up - i think it was during the sku creation process. i installed everything in a vm fine, all of the skus showed up (i only installed and activated enterprise with kms_vl_all), and all of the simplix updates and everything appear to be present, so i guess everything's cool?

i'm perfectly aware that i need bypassesu to install esu updates, but what i'm wondering is whether or not posready 7 updates will work on non-embedded versions of windows 7, and if i should use enterprise or posready 7 if i want to use windows 7 in the near future

i physically can't use linux atm because i don't have a wifi adapter for my current pc that supports it, i'd like to try using it on raw metal first before using it full time, and i run a lot of old windows software that i'd like to test personally with wine/proton. tbh i like most versions of windows nt, and if i could, i would probably use 7 (or 2000) forever - it's just that microsoft has become even more draconian over the last decade and linux is the only real alternative