Thanks for sharing the source That article from Gregg seems more like an educated guess. He doesn't refer to any specific LTSC/release - just "W10" as a whole Besides MS has specifically stated that there won't be extended support for 21H2 (with the exception of IoT) Having read plenty of feedback, I m slowly moving away from the 1809 prospect For me and my needs, 1607 has been an absolute gem (in Windows evolution terms). I wish they d support it further, but I don't see this happening So now I m trying to figure if 21H2 is somewhat worthy successor to the 1607..
Do you really think that a company that is keeping alive OSes from 2008/2009 will be happy to let go to linux or whatever all the users AND COMPANIES who dislike W11, or can't install it w/o replacing their HW, in 2026? MS in 2020s is not Bill Gates' MS, it's a company that sells blades, not razors, they will be happy to let you run Win311 as soon you use Bing, the market, you buy a lot of apps and so on. In 90's people replaced W311 with W95, almost overnight, because W95 was hugely improved. In 2026 people wouldnb't care less to move to W11/W12/Whatever unless they bring something big to the table, which is unlikely. MS will react accordingly.
I am not saying such a move wouldn't make any sense - but I doubt it will be the case for 1607, having it extended (unless you where talking generic - not for a particular release) At some point, they gonna have to make a choice (which releases they can afford to maintain - they can't possibly keep all of them) I don't have any stats as to what the usage (per release) is at the moment, otherwise I would be able to make an educated guess At this stage, I consider more likely for them to extend 21H2 (even though they categorically said they won't), rather than 1607 Besides you can't really take their word for it - not too long ago it was stated that W10 will be the 'last version of windows'
You forgot one thing: 1607 = (also) Server 2016. And if they will extend the support for server 2016 (which is almost sure) supporting LTSB 2016 will come almost for free (I mean not much additional work for MS). LTSB2015 is a different matter, although it makes sense for a niche of users, MS treat it as son of a lesser god since the AD 2016, no official .nt 4.8 (unlike win7/8.1) broken and never fixed offline update procedure, and so on. It's almost sure they will happily drop it in 2025.